Total  Utility  and  the  Economic 

Judgment 

Compared  with  their  Ethical  Counterparts 


A  DISSERTATION 

PRESENTED  TO  THE  FACULTY  OF  BRYN  MAWR 

COLLEGE  FOR  THE  DEGREE  OF  DOCTOR 

OF  PHILOSOPHY 


BY 

MARION   PARRIS 


1909 


PHILADELPHIA: 
THE  JOHN  C.  WINSTON  CO 

1909 


'      M      '  ' 


*    J    J  '  ■»     ' 


Copyright,   1909 

BY 

Marion  Parris 


•  •»••        ♦.••••  •        •         ^»  ^          •«•         •  •          ••• 

•  *«••••                   ••  ♦••*•                            •••  •••!,«» 

•  ••*•••••••  •••                      •                    ..••  «•••• 

•.  /    •  •  ••••..      -  \  :     

•  ••••  ••«••!  f'>  •  M*  •  «• 

_••,•••         ••••      .•  •      •        «              ••      _•-           •  •••      • 

•/      •      •       ••• ••..      •  *•• 

•    •      •      •       ••/. /•••       •  •••• 


»*         «         .••       »•* 


CONTENTS. 


Page 
CHAPTER  I Introduction    c 

CHAPTER  n The  Concept  of  Utility  in  English  Ethics i8 

CHAPTER  HI Total  Utility  and  the  Economic  Judgment 64 


CHAPTER  I. 
Introduction. 

The  general  obj'ect  of  this  study  is  to  set  forth  the  organic 
connection  between  certain  concepts  appearing  as  integral  parts 
of  modern  ethical  and  economic  theory,  and  to  indicate  several 
points  of  similarity  in  the  logical  processes  which  they  involve. 
The  position  of  the  person  who  draws  analogies  between  two 
sciences,  or  two  fields  of  human  thought,  or  who  asserts  paral- 
lelisms and  identities  is  one  of  peculiar  difficulty.  Not  only  are 
there  separate  fields  to  cover,  and  separate  philosophical  and 
critical  points  of  view  to  consider,  but  the  difficulties  of  termin- 
ology are  great.  The  same  words  are  often  used  in  different 
subjects  with  a  different  connotation,  or  terms  used  in  one 
science  in  a  specialised  sense,  are  often  misleading  or  meaning- 
less in  another  connection.  This  is  especially  true  with  respect 
to  ethical  and  economic  terminology,  where  such  words  as: 
"value,"  "worth,"  "interest,"  and  many  others  receive  in  each 
science  a  specialised  and  technical  meaning. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  necessary  at  all  periods  of  speculative  think- 
ing to  point  out  likenesses  as  well  as  differences ;  to  emphasise 
grounds  in  common  as  well  as  specialised  characteristics ;  and 
last  of  all,  to  apply  methods  found  to  be  fruitful  in  one  field  of 
investigation  to  another,  in  hopes  of  attaining  new  or  suggestive 
results.  It  is  this  latter  point  which  I  wish  to  emphasise.  Anal- 
ogies and  parallelisms  between  Ethics  and  Economics  may  be 
multiplied  ad  libitum.  They  will  always  be  suggestive  for  illus- 
tration and  example,  but  as  such,  have  an  explanatory  rather 
than  a  scientific  or  definitive  value.  But  in  the  course  of  specu- 
lative thinking  in  the  nineteenth  century  a  subjective  field  of 
inquiry  was  opened  up  to  the  political  economist.  A  subjective 
side  of  modern  economics  has  been  definitely  formulated  in  the 
study  of  the  Subjective  Factor  in  the  determination  of  value ;  viz., 

(5) 

45GG15 


6  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

the  nature  of  the  subject  who  values,  as  opposed  to  the  Objective 
Factor,  or  object  valued,  and  the  relation  between  the  sciences 
of  Ethics  and  Economics  has  become  a  fundamental  and  organic 
one.  Certain  problems  came  to  be  separated  off  from  the  prob- 
lems of  conduct  in  general  and  considered  as  specifically  eco- 
nomic; such  as  the  motives  and  laws  of  economic  activity  es- 
pecially in  valuation,  the  laws  of  the  mutation  of  price  and  the 
fluctuation  of  demand.  Hence  in  the  subject-matter  of  modern 
ethical  speculation,  the  psychological  principles  which  are  ad- 
mitted as  grounds  for  the  various  forms  of  human  activity,  such 
as  the  Will,  Instinct,  Habit,  etc.,  become  of  the  utmost  impor- 
tance to  the  economic  student  who  admits  the  subjective  factor 
in  such  phenomena  as  Value,  Price,  Demand  and  Supply. 
r"  And  to-day  in  all  treatises  on  theoretical  economics,  scholars/ 
admit  this  Factor.  An  account  of  the  nature  of  human  wants 
precedes  ex  post  facto  all  formulations  of  economic  laws  and  all 
groupings  of  economic  phenomena.  Economics  is  regarded  as 
a  science  that  has  a  subjective  as  well  as  an  objective  field  of 
investigation.^  The  objects  desired  form  the  subject-matter  of 
the  latter;  the  desiring  subject,  the  phenomenon  for  investiga- 

^  The  study  and  analysis  of  the  subjective  factor  has  claimed  especial 
attention  from  the  group  of  scholars  in  more  or  less  close  connection 
with  the  "Austrian  School."  Following  Gossen  and  TCarl  Menger's  gen- 
eral formulation  of  the  Laws  of  Want  we  have  a  series  of  logical  and 
psychological  studies  in  the  concepts  of  value  and  the  phenomena  of 
want  and  desire-  The  movement  originated  with  Brentano's  "Psychologic 
vom  Emperischen  Standpunkt."  This  was  followed  in  1893  by  Ehren- 
fel's  "Werththeorie  und  Ethik,"  1893,  and  "System  der  Werththeorie," 
1894;  by  Meinong's  "Psychologische-ethische  Untersuchungen  zur  Werth- 
theorie," 1894,  and  "Das  Bediirfnis,"  by  Oskar  Kraus  in  1894.  More 
recently  Kreibig  has  published  his  "Psychologische  Grundlegimg  eines 
Systems  der  Werththeorie"  (1902),  and  Schwarz,  "Psychologic  des  Wil- 
lens  zur  Grundlegimg  der  Ethik,"  1900.  Cuhel's  "Zur  Lehre  von  den 
Bediirfnissen"  appeared  in  1907.  The  latter  work  is  an  exhaustive  analysis 
of  the  various  concepts  appearing  under  the  general  title  Want  (Bediirf- 
nis), thus  clearing  the  way  for  a  thorough  examination  of  the  funda- 
mental ideas  which  underlie  the  various  definitions  of  want,  desire,  will, 
etc.,  in  their  economic  relation  to  the  theories  of  value. 


INTRODUCTION.  ^ 

tion  of  the  former.  Wants  and  desires  have  been  classified ;  the 
sequence  of  their  appearance  in  consciousness  has  been  observed, 
and  certain  laws  of  wants  have  been  formulated  to  account  for 
the  first  impulse  toward  economic  activity.  The  study  of  Want 
(Bediirfnis)  is  indeed  the  latest  chapter  in  the  theory  of  eco- 
nomic relations. 

All  modern  scholars  on  the  subject  emphasise  the  fact  that 
this  branch  of  economic  investigation  is  most  closely  allied  to 
the  science  of  psychology :  in  fact  that  it  is  a  special  province 
in  the  domain  of  psychological  research.  The  sequence  of  wants, 
their  variety,  intensity  and  extent,  the  action  of  the  will  on  the; 
environment  to  satisfy  desire,  are  all  facts  which  have  a  deter- 
mining influence  on  economic  phenomena,  but  are  properly  recog- 
nised as  activities  of  the  functioning  self,  and  as  such,  are  psy- 
chological manifestations.  The  relation  between  the  Subjective 
Factor  in  theoretical  economics,  and  the  more  general  science  of 
psychical  activity,  or  psychology  is  undoubtedly  clearly  defined. 
Economics  takes  from  psychology  certain  general  principles  of 
human  activity,  and  proceeds  to  investigate  the  operation  of 
such  principles  in  its  own  special  field.  The  point  that  is  noT 
so  distinctly  recognised  is  the  relation  between  the  Subjective 
Factor  in  economic  theory  and  the  science  of  ethics,  and  the 
significance  for  Economics  of  the  assumptions  and  logical  pro- 
cesses which  form  the  basis  of  ethical  reasoning.  If  psychology 
investigates  the  phenomena  of  the  functioning  self,  ethics  in*C 
vestigates  the  goal  toward  which  human  activity  is  impelled  to  ) 
move,  and  endeavors  to  formulate  a  theory  of  the  end,  in  view  > 
of  which  all  the  activity  making  up  human  life  is  regarded  as 
the  means.  "The  human  being  desiring  the  object  A,"  is  a  psy- 
chological phenomenon,  in  truth,  the  essence  of  one  of  the  most 
complicated  chapters  in  the  science  of  psychology.  "The  human 
being  acting  upon  outer-nature  to  satisfy  the  desire  for  object 
A"  is  again  the  essence  of  the  economic  process.  "The  reason 
why  the  human  being  desires  A,  and  not  B,  C,  or  D,"  in  other 
words,  the  relation  of  desire  A  to  other  desires  and  its  place 
in  the  total  sum  of  desires,  is  the  problem  of  ethics.     Whether 


8  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

this  total  is  naturalistically  explained  as  the  working  out  of  the 
blind  forces  of  nature  through  the  surviving  species,  or  as  an 
ideal  becoming  explicitly  expressed  in  consciousness  depends 
on  the  ethical  point  of  view.  The  explanation  is  ethical  when 
it  relates  a  human  being  to  his  cosmos ;  or  explains  his  action  in 
view  of  its  end. 

Modern  economic  theory  makes  many  such  cosmical  assertions 
in  the  discussions  of  Total  Utility  as  the  sum  of  our  known  wants 
or  of  scales  of  wants ;  and  in  discussions  of  measures  of  value  as 
Marginal  Utilities,  which  imply  a  standard  or  ideal  to  which  mar- 
ginal utilities  are  referred.  In  fact  the  whole  theory  of  valuation 
developed  by  the  Austrian  School,  and  derived  ultimately  from 
Gossen's  studies  of  the  variety  and  satiability  of  wants,  is  essen- 
tially the  calculation  of  least  urgent  wants  over  against  all  possible 
wants  in  any  person  or  group  of  persons,  and  as  such,  is  teleo- 
logical  in  method  and  ethical  in  nature.  It  needs  only  certain 
rearrangement  and  specification  in  terminology  to  be  brought  in 
line  with  the  whole  idealistic  trend  of  ethical  thinking. 

The  subjective  factor  in  economic  theory  would  thus  seem 
to  be  a  branch  of  the  science  of  psychology ;  and  in  the  deter- 
mination of  the  end  to  be  a  part  of  ethics,  and  thus  to  be  in  the 
embarrassing  position  of  having  struggled  for  the  possession 
of  a  "Field  of  Inquiry"  which  in  reality  belongs  to  other  sciences. 
That  this  is  not  the  case,  we  shall  endeavor  to  make  clear  in 
the  course  of  this  study.  From  the  very  subjective-objective 
character  of  economic  phenomena,  the  subjective  factor  of  want 
or  demand  in  every  judgment  of  valuation  is  in  functional  rela- 
tion with  some  part  of  the  world  of  supply.  This  functional 
relationship  gives  to  the  subjective  factor  a  characteristic  of  its 
own,  which  is  not  purely  psychological  though  a  manifestation 
of  the  self  as  functioning,  and  which  is  not  purely  ethical,  though 
it  can  be  valued  only  with  respect  to  the  end.  It  is  an  expres- 
sion of  want  as  related  to  the  world  of  limited  supply,  of  the  de- 
pendence of  the  self  on  the  world  of  goods,  and  as  such  expresses 
/  a  purely  economic  relationship.  Both  psychology  and  ethics  may 
I  study  the  laws  of  human  activity  as  expended  on,  or  afifected  by. 


INTRODUCTION.  g 

economic  goods  and  services.  They  may  also  for  the  purposes 
of  analyses  regard  the  self  as  abstracted  from  the  phenomenal 
world.  Economics,  however,  regards  man  in  one  relation  only : 
that  of  dependence  upon  certain  objective  factors  which  are 
called  economic  commodities.  — — 

But  though  the  fields  investigated  by  these  three  sciences  of 
human  activities  are  quite  distinct,  theoretical  economics  encoun- 
ters problems  similar  to  those  investigated  by  the  psychologist 
and  the  moralist.  Not  the  least  important  of  these  are  certain 
great  points  of  controversy,  which  from  time  to  time  have  split 
the  ranks  of  the  moralists  into  opposing  "schools."  These  are, 
in  general,  problems  dealing  with  the  motive  impelling  to  any 
act,  the  nature  of  the  end  to  be  obtained  by  the  act,  and  the 
nature  of  the  criterion  for  judging  whether  the  means  will  fur- 
ther the  end.  In  whatever  terms  these  problems  of  human  ac- 
tivity are  interpreted  to  explain  conduct  in  general,  the  same 
terms  may  be  used  to  explain  economic  conduct  in  particular. 

The  formulation  of  the  "laws  of  want"  or  "laws  of  sensi- 
bility" which  serve  to-day  as  the  psychological  point  of  depart- 
ure for  mosf  of  our  economic  reasoning,  gradually  came  to 
assume  its  present  form  in  the  last  half  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury. At  the  same  time  a  great  conflict  between  antagonistic 
modes  of  thought  was  remoulding  ethical  concepts  for  the  Eng- 
lish-speaking world.  This  controversy  was  reflected  in  the  cur- 
rent discussions  as  to  the  laws  of  economic  activity,  and  coloured 
to  a  great  degree  the  formulation  of  the  subjective  factor. 

In  the  domain  of  ethical  speculation  in  the  English-speaking 
world,  two  great  rivers  of  theory  met  and  intermingled  in  the 
last  four  decades  of  the  nineteenth  century  so  that  for  a  time 
all  sharp  distinctions  and  clear  cut  categories  seemed  lost  in  their 
troubled  waters.  Tlie  slender  stream  of  idealistic  thinking,  per- 
sisting in  English  ethics  from  the  Cambridge  Platonists  of  the 
seventeenth  century,  was  mightily  reinforced  by  an  interest  in 
metaphysics  awakened  by  the  German  post-Kantian  idealists. 
The  revival  of  an  idealistic  interpretation  of  life  beginning  with 
Coleridge  and  Carlyle  found  its  native  expression  and  English 


lO  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

exponents  in  the  ethical  writings  of  Martineau  and  Green;  and 
its  full  expression  to-day  in  the  works  of  Muirhead,  Bosanquet 
and  F.  H.  Bradley.  This  positive  body  of  English  idealistic 
thought,  however  strengthened  by  the  influence  of  the  Germaa 
philosophers,  was  indigenous.  It  had  persisted  for  two  cen- 
turies in  the  face  of  a  most  redoubtable  antagonist.  For  though 
the  trend  of  ethical  idealism  had  been  maintained  from  Henry 
More  and  Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury,  through  Shaftesbury, 
Hutchinson  and  the  Scottish  Intuitional  School,  the  main  body 
of  English  ethics  had  remained,  since  Hobbes,  stoutly  natural- 
istic and  utilitarian  in  character.  But  Utilitarian  Theory  itself, 
representing  as  it  did  the  dominant  and  positive  ethical  interpre- 
tation, had  departed  of  necessity  from  its  seventeenth  century 
position,  and  in  the  two  centuries  following  Hobbes  had  been 
proceeding  along  lines  that  would  have  led  eventually  to  its  own 
negation,  as  may  be  seen  in  studying  its  fate  in  the  hands  of 
John  Stuart  Mill.  At  a  critical  moment,  however,  it  received 
incalculable  strength  from  the  body  of  evolutionary  doctrine, 
which  followed  the  publication  of  the  "Origin  of  Species"  in 

1859. 
^  It  was  thus  against  utilitarianism  reinforced  by  the  ethics  of 
evolution  that  English  idealism  had  to  contend.  In  the  contro- 
versy which  raged  in  the  forty  years  which  followed  Darwin's 
great  work,  the  entrenched  party  in  English  ethics  still  con- 
tended for  the  "greatest  sum  of  pleasure"  which,  however,  only 
the  "fit  could  survive  to  attain ;"  while  the  encroaching  party  in 
the  persons  of  the  idealists  declared  a  "sum  of  pleasure"  un- 
thinkable and  unrealisable,  and  held  the  end  of  all  purposive  con- 
duct to  be  the  "realisation  of  self,"  an  Aristotelian  concept  re- 
vivified by  Hegel. 

Contemporaneous  with  the  interest  in  ethical  and  philosophic 
problems,  was  an  era  of  great  speculative  activity  in  economic 
science,  as  vital  to  clear  thinking  as  the  controversies  between 
Utilitarianism  and  Idealism,  or  the  mooted  question  as  to  the 
antagonism  between  "science  and  religion."  By  the  very  sub- 
ject matter,  however,  it  was  not  so  adapted  to  popular  repre- 


INTRODUCTION.  I  i 

sentation  in  pulpit  and  newspaper  and  hence  is  not  so  intimately 

interwoven  in  current  thought.  * 

This  controversy,  or  rather  series  of  inquiries,  revolved  about 
the  question  as  to  where  the  fundamentals  of  economic  science 
should  be  sought;  whether  objectively  in  the  phenomena  of 
wealth,  capital  and  naturally  scarce  objects;  or  subjectively,  in 
the  wants,  necessities  and  nature  of  man.  The  science  of  Eco- 
nomics, which  has  come  to  be  the  more  technical  name  for  the 
earlier  descriptive  study  called  "Political  Economy^'  has  followed 
much  the  course  of  utilitarian  ethics.  In  the  early  descriptive 
days  of  the  science  emphasis  was  laid  on  the  external,  objective 
side ;  on  goods,  exchangeable  articles,  on  the  "Wealth  of  Na- 
tions." Finding  a  description  of  the  interchange  of  commodities 
inadequate  to  account  for  the  laws  of  wealth  and  the  facts  of 
value,  a  naturalistic  pleasure-pain  psychology  was  early  asstmied, 
reflected  as  it  were,  from  the  dominant  ethical  school,  which  is 
exemplified  in  the  Theory  of  Value  as  Labour  or  Pain.  This 
naturalistic  psychology  is  found  implicit  in  Adam  Smith,  and  is 
explicitly  stated  by  his  successors  in  the  "classical  school."  But 
it  proved  more  and  more  unsatisfactory  as  men  came  to  have  a 
wider  knowledge  of  economic  facts,  and  as  more  analytical  in- 
vestigations were  made  as  to  man's  "economic  nature."  The 
Labour  Theory  of  Value  carried  with  it  the  germs  of  its  own 
dissolution,  as  did  the  analogous  Utilitarian  Theory  of  Conduct 
in  ethics ;  and  in  the  course  of  its  development  engendered  a 
body  of  exceptions  to  its  own  laws  of  such  magnitude  that  Jevons 
in  a  single  work  transferred  the  fundamentals  of  the  science 
from  a  Theory  of  Costs,  calculated  in  objective  terms  as  Labour 
Costs  and  Capital  Costs,  to  the  position  of  a  normative,  as  we 
shall  call  it  later,  an  idealistic  science,  by  which  the  worth  of  a 
stock  of  goods,  or  of  any  part  of  a  stock  might  be  calculated  by 
means  of  subjective  valuations  called  Final  Utilities.  Curiously 
enough  the  same  reversive  step  was  taken  independently  by  the 
German  economist  Gossen,  and  was  later  amplified  into  the  body 
of  theory  which  bears  the  name  of  the  Austrian  School.  And 
again  at  a  critical  moment  English  theory  was  reinforced  by  the 
fruits  of  German  speculation. 


12  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

"  In  the  era  which  followed  Jevons'  work,  the  whole  trend  of 
economic  discussion  centered  about  the  application  of  a  subjec- 
tive or  "Marginal"  theory  of  value.  The  theory  still  clung  to 
a  natural  pleasure-pain  psychology  as  a  hypothesis,  and  ques- 
tions as  to  how  a  sum  of  total  well-being  or  Total  Utility  can  be 
calculated  from  separate  "increments  of  satisfaction"  borrowed 
directly  in  terminology  and  argument  from  the  analogous  dis- 
cussion as  to  the  possibility  of  a  "sum  of  pleasure"  raging  in 
the  field  of  ethics. 

No  student  of  the  contemporary  literature  in  these  subjects 
can  be  unaware  that  the  controversies  and  discussions  thus 
briefly  indicated  occupied  the  attention  of  ethical  and  economic 
scholars  until  the  last  decade  of  the  nineteenth  century.  The  mass 
of  argument  put  forth  in  the  scientific  journals  from  i860- 1890- 
gives  evidences  of  the  unsettled  state  of  both  sciences ;  how  ill 
^Jefined  were  their  respective  fields,  and  how  far  from  agree- 
-'  ment  were  scholars  as  to  the  fundamentals.  Is  man  a  natural- 
istic being,  an  idealistic  being,  or  both?  Is  the  end  which  he 
seeks  to  attain  a  sum  of  pleasure,  an  ideal  of  perfection,  or  a 
modification  of  the  two  concepts?  Does  he  value  a  good  from 
the  labour,  cost  or  abstinence  which  its  production  necessitated, 

^  For  typical  examples  of  these  discussions  see  "The  Utilitarian 
'Ought,' "  by  E.  Gurney,  Mind  VII  (old  series)  ;  "Pleasure,  Pain,  Desire 
and  Volition,"  F.  H.  Bradley,  Mind  XIII  (old  series)  ;  "The  Logic  of 
the  Ethics  of  Evolution,"  W.  Mitchell,  Mind  XV  (old  series)  ;  "The  Idea 
of  Value,"  S.  Alexander,  Mind  I  (new  series)  ;  "The  Hedonic  Calculus," 
Edgworth,  Mind  III  (new  series);  "Can  There  Be  a  Sum  of  Pleasure?" 
H.  Rashdell,  Mind  VIII  (new  series),  and  "The  Commensurability  of  all 
Values,"  Mind  XI  (new  series)  ;  "Hedonism  among  the  Idealists,"  B. 
Bosanquet,   Mind  XII    (new  series)  ;   "The  Relation  between  Ethics  and 

Jropomics,"  J.  S.  Mackenzie,  International  Journal  of^Ethics,' Vol.  VllI; 
"Theory  of  Value  and  Its  Place  in  Ethics,"  C.  G.  Shaw,  International 
Journal  of  Ethics,  XI;  "Is  Pleasure  the  Summum  Bonum?"  A.  Seth, 
International  Journal  of  Ethics,  VI;_  "Hedonistic  Interpretation  of  Sub- 

-feetive  Value,"  H.  W.  Smart,' Journal  of  Political  Econom^  IVT 'Wealth 
and  Welfare  f  A  Study  in  Subjective  Economics,"  Annals  of  American 
Academy,  XII ;  'Thilosophical  Basis  of  Economics,"  S.  Sherwood,  Annals 
of  American  Academy,  X.  '  •—— 


INTRODUCTION. 


13 


or  from  a  subjective  calculation  of  the  intensity  of  the  want  felt 
for  it;  or  a  mingHng  of  both  factors?    These  are  types  of  ques- 
tions, familiar  to  all  students  of  modern  ethics  and  economics, 
and   indicate    the    presence   of   several    antagonistic  systems    of/ 
thought. 

But  it  is  equally  evident  that  since  1890,  and  certainly  within 
the  last  ten  years,  these  questions  have  ceased  to  be  vital  within 
the  domain  of  their  respective  subjects.  In  ethics  the  idealistic 
point  of  view,  with  certain  definite  modifications  owing  to  the 
widened  knowledge  of  the  data  of  human  experience  opened  up 
by  experimental  psychology,  has  steadily  gained  ascendency 
over  the  older  and  cruder  Utilitarianism.  Thought  and  inves- 
tigation has  turned  to  the  detailed  and  analytical  studies  of  the 
elements  of  ethical  life ;  the  function  of  the  emotions  and  the 
passions;  the  manifestations  of  the  will,  and  analysis  of  the 
ethical  judgment. 

In  the  sphere  of  economics,  even  more  noticeably  than  in 
ethics  the  attention  of  students  has  passed  from  the  more  general 
theoretical  aspects  of  the  science  to  the  investigation  of  special 
phenomena.  The  attitude  of  the  majority  of  economists  to-day 
is  to  apply  certain  theoretical  principles  to  the  mass  of  fact  pre- 
sented by  the  present  industrial  conditions,  and  advances  in 
theory  are  confined  in  most  part  to  improvements  in  method, 
whether  historical,  statistical  or  logical.  The  investigations 
which  certain  German  and  Austrian  economists  are  carrying  on 
as  to  the  logical  and  psychological  processes  involved  in  acts  of 
valuation  and  concepts  of  value  have  been  for  the  most  part 
critical  and  destructive.  Any  single  constructive  principle  upon 
which  to  unify  these  studies  is  lacking,  and  so  their  work  has 
up  to  this  time  had  little  modifying  efifect  on  economic  theory  in 
general ;  moreover,  their  work  is  not  widely  known  to  the  Eng- 
lish-speaking world. ^    The  theoretic  principles  upon  which  most 

'  Professor  Wilbur  M.  Urban,  of  Trinity  College,  Hartford,  has  con- 
tributed a  number  of  most  illuminating  critical  essays  on  modern  theories 
of  vahie  and  the  work  of  these  German  scholars  to  the  various  philosoph- 
ical journals.     Note:  "The  Relation  of  the  Individual  to  the  Social  Value 


14  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

of  modern  economic  investigation  rests,  seems  to  be  in  general, 
the  theory  of  value  which  has  been  most  fully  developed  by  the 
Austrian  School,  when  their  concept  of  Marginal  Utility  as  the 
measure  of  value  is  duly  connected  with  the  classical  Cost 
Theory  of  Value  by  Professor  Marshall's  famous  analogy  of  the 
"pair  of  shears,"  and  when  the  theory  is  amplified  on  the  side 
of  Distribution  by  Professor  Clark's  "functional  theory,"  or  Pro- 
fessor Hobson's  Theory  of  Collective  Bargaining. 

It  may  be  that  we  are  too  near  the  revolutionary  and  for- 
mative period  of  speculative  thinking  in  the  latter  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century  to  estimate  how  far  the  theoretic  spirit  has 
carried  us,  or  to  appreciate  what  form  it  has  assumed.  It  is 
possible,  also,  that  the  present  position  of  economic  theory  is  a 
tentative  one;  a  breathing  space,  as  it  were,  before  storming 
the  next  theoretic  fastness.  It  provides  us  with  a  fairly  con- 
venient set  of  principles  for  interpreting  the  almost  overwhelm- 
ing mass  of  modern  economic  and  industrial  phenomena;  but 
it  may  give  way  before  some  future  "master  economist"  who 
will  fit  more  illuminating  categories  to  the  increased  knowledge 
of  economic  fact,  and  will  bring  to  another  science  a  "Copernican 
Revolution." 

Meanwhile  it  cannot  but  be  valuable  for  clear  thinking  to 
re-examine  the  assumptions  upon  which  current  economic  theory 
rests  in  light  of  the  parallelism  of  its  development  with  that  of 
modern   English   ethics,   and   to   correlate   the  body   of   theory 
^plaining  economic  processes  as   formulated  by  the  Austrian 
'School  and  their  Italian,  English,  and  American  representatives 
with  the  theory  of  conduct  found  in  modern  English  ethics.     A 
[Secondary  object  of  this  study  is  to  formulate  the  so-called  "Sub- 
jective  Factor"   in   modern   economic   theory   which   means   the 
^■tlieory  of  motivation  which   has  been   assumed  to   account   for 
economic  activity.    We  are  concerned  especially  with  the  concept 

Series,"  Philosophical  Review,  1902.  "The  Consciousness  of  Value,"  Psy- 
chological Review,  1902;  "Recent  Tendencies  in  the  Psychological  Theory 
of  Value,"  Psychological  Review,  IV;  "Definition  and  Analysis  of  the 
Consciousness  of  Value,"  Psychological  Review,  1907. 


INTRODUCTION.  1 5 

of  end  to  be  attained,  the  Total,  whether  of  goods  or  satis- 
faction, which  is  regarded  as  the  objective  point  for  which  any 
economic  process  is  undertaken :  and  the  nature  of  the  economic 
judgment  which  is  the  keynote  to  the  modern  theories  of  value. 
We  shall  compare  the  form  in  which  we  find  these  concepts  in 
current  economic  theory  with  their  analogous  concepts  in  ethics : 
the  ethical  end  or  ideal,  which  any  act  tends  to  realise;  and  the 
ethical  judgment  of  worth  and  approval  which  measures  each  act 
with  view  to  the  end. 

In  order  to  make  this  comparison  we  must  have  clearly  in 
mind  the  ethical  concepts  of  end,  criterion  and  judgment  to  which 
the  economic  forms  correspond.  But  modern  ethical  theory,  as  we 
have  suggested,  passed  through  certain  well  defined  phases  before 
assuming  its  present  form,  and  in  the  course  of  its  development 
encountered  certain  logical  difficulties  and  fallacies  especially 
in  the  Benthamite  period  of  Utilitarianism  the  solving  of  which 
engendered  a  body  of  argument  which  remains  to-day  a  valuable 
tool  to  use  in  attacking  like  fallacies  in  other  fields.  The  first  part 
of  this  study,  then,  will  be  a  brief  historical  outline  of  the  devel- 
opment of  the  dominant  school  of  ethics  in  England,  from  its 
formulation  after  the  work  of  Hobbes,  in  the  seventeenth  century, 
through  its  utilitarian  development  in  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  We  shall  indicate  the  gradual  working  away  from 
its  original  hypothesis  through  a  series  of  fallacies  and  assump- 
tions, until  it  was  freed  from  the  remnants  of  its  original  natural- 
ism by  the  more  metaphysical  and  idealistic  formulation  of  ethical 
theory  coming  in  with  the  nineteenth-century  philosophical 
Renaissance.  Ethics  as  the  older  and  more  subjective  study  con- 
sidered certain  problems  of  human  conduct,  and  embodies  in  its 
literature,  both  ancient  and  modern,  certain  arguments,  concepts 
and  logical  forms,  which  economics  as  the  younger  and  more 
objective  science  has  been  slow  to  recognise,  but  which  are  of  the 
utmost  consequence  to-day  in  formulating  the  subjective  prin- 
ciples which  underlie  economic  theory. 

These  same  problems  appear  in  modern  life  clothed  in  another 
terminology.    The  great  extent  of  industrial  and  economic  organi- 


1 6  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

sation,  which  received  new  impetus  from  the  improved  methods 
of  production  and  the  substitution  of  machinery  for  hand  labour 
in  the  last  half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  has  widened  the  horizon 
of  human  action,  deepened  the  sense  of  human  power,  and  sharp- 
ened and  specialised  the  judging  and  valuing  faculties.  The  area 
of  human  activity  is  extended :  and  coincidently,  knowledge  of  the 
data  of  experience  is  more  exact.  The  concepts  presented  to  the 
modern  citizen  of  the  industrial  world,  though  complicated  and 
far-reaching,  are  explicitly  concrete  and  full  of  content.  The 
End  which  he  contemplates,  he  pictures  to  himself  in  terms  of 
Capital  controlled;  the  Means  to  the  End,  he  objectifies  in  Pro- 
ductive forces,  whether  his  own  labour  or  his  control  over  other 
human  or  natural  powers.  His  very  judging  and  valuing  facul- 
ties have  become  so  systematised  and  organised  in  the  formation 
of  great  world  markets,  that  they  appear  to  him,  not  so  much  as 
voluntary  human  activities,  but  as  statistical  tables  of  market 
prices.  But  the  same  concepts  which  furnished  the  mental  world 
of  the  Greek  philosopher,  appear  to-day  as  economic  postulates  in 
the  modern  industrial  world.  The  End  of  economic  activity ;  the 
means  of  attaining  it,  and  the  faculty  for  judging  or  valuing  the 
means  with  respect  to  the  End; — these  are  the  fundamental  con- 
cepts which  form  the  subject  matter  of  economics. 

The  second  part  of  this  study  (Chapter  III)  will  be  an  attempt 
to  formulate  the  Subjective  Factor  in  theoretical  economics  with 
regard  to  the  three  points  already  indicated,  and  to  subject  such 
concepts  to  a  direct  comparison  with  their  ethical  counterparts, 
with  the  hope  that  such  an  attempt  will  not  only  keep  free 
economic  thinking  from  the  confusion  between  naturalism  and 
idealism,  but  will  more  clearly  define  the  relation  of  theoretical 
economics  to  psychology  and  ethics.  The  economic  problems 
which  we  shall  analyse  center  about  the  concepts  of  the  economic 
End  or  Total  Utility;  the  economic  Measure;  or  Marginal  Util- 
ity, and  the  economic  Judgment  of  Value.  In  formulating  the 
economic  judgment  and  relating  it  to  other  forms  of  the  judgment, 
the  intellectual,  ethical  and  aesthetic  judgment,  we  hope  to  sug- 
gest a  possible  canon  of  distinction  which  may  serve  to  separate 


INTRODUCTION. 


17 


phenomena  and  enable  us  to  draw  sharper  Hnes  as  to  the  various 
"fields  of  inquiry." 

A  history  of  modern  ethical  and  economic  theory,  therefore,  is 
not  the  object  of  the  study.  Such  works  exist,  if  not  in  abundance, 
at  least  in  such  numbers  as  to  meet  the  needs  of  students.  Nor 
would  such  an  unbounded  investigation  serve  our  purpose.  Cer- 
tain concepts  are  present  in  modern  economic  speculation,  which 
are  not  clearly  conceived,  or  suffer  from  conflicting  definition. 
Moreover,  they  are  problems  and  concepts  dealing  with  the  Sub- 
jective Factor  or  man  as  a  valuing  agent,  not  with  the  objective 
world  of  fact.  They  deal  with  the  nature  of  the  man  who  counts, 
hoards,  exchanges  and  consumes,  not  with  things  counted, 
hoarded,  exchanged  or  used  up.  They  lie  in  that  debated  border- 
land between  economics,  ethics  and  psychology  whose  boundaries 
have  remained  undefined  since  economic  theory  annexed  a  subjec- 
tive province  to  its  former  realm  of  "scarce  natural  objects"  and 
"exchangeable  goods."  Though  they  all  have  a  specific  economic 
character  when  brought  into  relation  to  the  world  of  limited 
supply,  they  have  received  a  general  formulation  in  the  science  of 
conduct.  A  sketch  of  the  development  of  these  concepts  in  mod- 
ern English  utilitarian  ethics  and  the  natural  transition  to  an 
idealistic  interpretation  in  the  ethical  work  of  J.  S.  Mill,  though 
seemingly  disconnected,  is  the  necessary  introduction  to  a  state- 
ment of  the  same  problems  as  they  appear  in  theoretical  economics 
to-day.  It  must  precede  an  application  of  the  canons  of  criticism 
and  distinction  appearing  in  the  long  course  of  ethical  develop- 
ment to  the  concepts  of  Total  and  Marginal  Utility,  and  to  that 
form  of  the  dialectic  of  the  economic  judgment,  which  in  the 
relatively  short  course  of  its  development,  the  latter  science  has 
been  obliged  to  assume  to  account  for  the  otherwise  arbitraryy 
effect  of  human  volition  on  economic  phenomena. 


CHAPTER  II. 

The  Concept  of  Utility  in  English  Ethics. 

HobbcsfT  The  history  of  English  utiHtarianism  may  be  described  from 
I  one  point  of  view  as  the  history  of  a  series  of  attempts  made  to 
1  escape  the  logical  consequences  of  a  naturalistic  account  of  human 
I  nature.  Such  accounts  of  the  nature  of  man  have  been  given  at 
various  epochs  in  the  history  of  speculative  thinking,  to  account 
for  the  apparently  non-natural,  supernatural  or  spiritual  character 
of  conscience,  or  morality  in  general.  One  of  the  most  noteworthy 
of  the  modern  versions  of  the  ethics  of  naturalism  was  formulated 
by  the  philosopher  Hobbes  in  the  seventeenth  century  in  his 
treatise  on  "Human  Nature"  ( 1642),  in  the  "De  Corpore  Politico" 
(1650)  and  in  the  Leviathan  (1651),  Part  I,  Of  Man.  It  accounts 
for  the  moral  nature  of  man  in  particular,  as  well  as  human 
psychology  in  general  in  physical  terms.  "Concerning  the  thoughts 
of  man  .  .  .  the  original  of  them  all  is  that  which  we  call 
sense,  for  there  is  no  conception  in  a  man's  mind  which  hath  not 
at  first,  totally  or  by  parts,  been  begotten  upon  the  organs  of 
sense.  .  .  .  The  cause  of  sense  is  the  external  body,  or  object, 
which  presseth  the  organ  proper  to  each  sense. "^  All  spiritual  or 
intellectual  powers  if  not  a  "seeming"  or  a  fancy  are  dependent 
on  physical  factors :  the  will  and  the  passion  are  described  as 
"motions"  and  "pressures."  To  quote  a  recent  critic  of  natural- 
ism, "The  psychology  now  associated  with  Naturalism  is  essen- 
tially the  same  as  that  which  Democritus  in  the  ancient  world 
and  Hobbes  in  the  modern  set  forth  as  a  suitable  outwork  of  their 
materialistic  theory  of  reality.'  Sensory  impressions  leave  certain 
residua  behind  them  called  ideas ;  and  these,  as  Hume  put  it,  by 
'a  kind  of  attraction  which  in  the  mental  world  will  be  found  tp 
have  as  extraordinary  effects  as  in  the  natural,'  are  held  to  give 

^Leviathan,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  I,  Routledge  edition. 

*W.  R.  Sorley,  "Ethics  of  Naturalism,"  2d  edition,  p.  17. 

(18) 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


19 


rise  to  the  whole  content  of  consciousness.     Naturalism  is  thus  a 
psychological  as  well  as  a  cosmological  theory,  and  may  be  tested 
by  the  adequacy  to  explain  the  mind  of  man  as  well  as  by  its  . 
competency  as  an  account  of  the  world." 

The  account  of  human  nature  elaborated  by  Hobbes  greatly 
influenced  the  form  in  which  naturalism  appears  in  English  utili- 
tarian ethics.     But  before  we  define  the  term  "naturalism,"  as  is 
used  in  this  paper,  we  must  note  very  briefly  Hobbes's  naturalisJjcy 
account  of  man,  as  giving  the  dominant  characteristics  of  such  a  \ 
pTiiTosophical  point  of  view.  "*r^v 

Hobbes  describes  man  as  existing  originally  and  naturally  in 
an  anti-social,  non-political  State  of  Nature.  Nature  has  created 
men  equal,  but  it  is  an  equality  of  weakness  rather  than  strength, 
as  "the  weakest  has  strength  enough  to  kill  the  strongest  either 
by  secret  machinations,  or  by  confederacy  with  others."^  As  all 
are  equal,  there  is  no  central  authority ;  and  "men  have  no  pleas- 
ure, but  on  the  contrary  a  great  deal  of  grief  in  keeping  company 
where  there  is  no  power  able  to  overawe  them  all."*  There  are 
moreover  in  the  nature  of  man  "three  principal  causes  of  quarrel," 
competition,  diffidence,  and  glory.  These  natural  instincts  lead 
men  to  "invade  for  gain,  for  safety  and  for  reputation,"  so  that 
the  natural  condition  of  mankind  is  war,  and  "such  a  war  is  of 
every  man  against  every  man."^  The  natural  condition  of  man- 
kind therefore  is  described  by  Hobbes  as  one  where  "there  is  no 
place  for  industry,  because  the  fruit  thereof  is  uncertain,  and 
consequently  no  culture  of  the  earth,  no  navigation  nor  use  of 
commodities  that  may  be  imported  by  sea,  no  commodious  build- 
ings ...  no  account  of  time,  no  arts,  no  letters,  no  society, 
and  which  is  worst  of  all,  continual  fear  and  danger  of  violent 
death,  and  the  life  of  man  solitary,  poor,  nasty,  brutish  and 
short."*'  In  the  state  of  nature,  therefore,  nothing  can  be  unjust. 
"The  notions  of  right  and  wrong,  justice  and  injustice  have  there 

"Leviathan,  Bk.  I,  Chap.  XIII,  p.  79. 
'Leviathan,  1.  c,  p.  80. 
"Leviathan,  1.  c,  p.  80. 
'Leviathan,  1.  c,  p.  81. 


20  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

no  place,  where  there  is  no  common  power,  there  is  no  law,  no 
injustice.  Fraud  and  force  are  in  war  the  two  cardinal  virtues."^ 
That  is;  in  the  natural  condition  of  mankind  ideas  of  morahty, 
justice,  law,  conscience,  moral  sense,  judgments  of  right  and 
wrong  "have  no  place."  They  may,  Hobbes  admits,  "oblige  in 
foro  interno,  that  is  to  say  they  bind  to  a  desire  they  should  take 
place ;  but  in  foro  externo,  that  as  to  the  putting  them  in  act,  not 
al_ways."* 

But  Hobbes  described  men  as  having  reason  as  well  as  the 

/instincts  of  fear,  competition,  and  love  of  glory.  Reason  points 
out  that  the  difificulties  of  the  precarious  state  of  nature  may  be 
avoided  if  men  are  mutually  willing  to  give  up  their  natural 
rights  of  war,  and  "to  confer  all  their  power  and  strength  upon 
one  man  or  one  assembly  of  men,  that  may  reduce  all  their 
v^^ills  by  plurality  of  voices  to  one  will."^  Thus  the  Leviathan  or 
sovereign  is  erected  by  the  mutual  contract  to  maintain  peace 
and  secure  life  and  property  to  the  individuals  in  the  state.  The 
means  which  the  sovereign  devises  to  insure  internal  peace  and 
protection  to  property  is  to  create  in  the  state  the  Social  Institu- 
tions ;  codes  of  law,  civil  and  criminal,  the  institution  of  private 
property,  the  moral  code  to  determine  individual  conduct,  and  the 
institution  of  religion.  Thus  the  whole  content  of  morality,  the 
idea  of  justice,  the  moral  motive  and  moral  obligation,  was 
regarded  as  something  superimposed  upon  the  natural  man  by 
\the  Leviathan,  or  organised  civil  society.  Man  is  naturally  non- 
jmoral,  and  in  the  state  of  nature  no  moral  considerations  would 
obtain.  Morality  is  an  artifice  or  convention,  a  means  toward 
furthering  some  social  or  political  end,  something  devised  by  a 
power  higher  than  any  individual  in  the  state,  and  imposed  on 
/the  individuals  from  above. 

^ — y  This  account  of  human  nature  as  non-moral,  and  of  morality 
as  in  some  way  adventitious  and  external,  is  what  we  call 
naturalism. 

'Leviathan,  1.  c,  p.  82. 

'Leviathan,  1.  c,  Pt.  \,  Chap.  XV,  p.  103. 

"Leviathan,  1.  c,  Pt.  II,  Chap.  XVII. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF   UTILITY   IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS.  21 

7 

Naturalism,  therefore,  includes  all  accounts  of  human  nature 
as  originally  non-moral,  depraved,  or  selfish;  all  accounts  of 
human  beings  as  actuated  only  by  motives  of  self-interest  without 
moral  consideration;  all  accounts  of  the  moral  obligation  as  not 
having  its  source  in  the  moral  nature  of  man,  but  as  operating 
on  human  action  in  some  sense  externally,  whether  by  the  will  of 
God  as  postulated  by  theological  naturalism,  or  by  the  social, 
religious  and  legal  sanctions  of  the  later  Utilitarians.  The  point 
to  note  is  that  naturally  man  knows  no  moral  obligation.  Recog- 
nition of  moral  obligation  is  forced  upon  the  individual  by  a 
divine  ordinance  of  God,  or  by  the  superior  force  of  society. 

Hobbes's  naturalistic  account  of  morality  immediately  crys- 
tallised the  keen  interest  in  ethical  subjects  awakened  in  the 
seventeenth  century  Renaissance,  into  support  and  attack.  The 
current  rationalistic  accounts  of  man  as  an  essentially  reasoning 
being;  of  morality  as  a  set  of  principles  innately  known;  of  the 
moral  process  as  that  of  immediately  identifying  fact  with  prin- 
ciple ;  and  the  end  of  life  as  bare  identity,  had  to  meet  and  combat  / 
a  system  definite  beyond  shadow  of  doubt.  Man  is  a  selfislT^ 
creature  ruled  by  appetite  alone ;  the  end  of  life  is  to  attain  the 
greatest  amount  of  happiness.  The  State  is  supposed  to  be  an 
invention  devised  to  satisfy  the  need  felt  for  effectively  safe- 
guarding man  from  the  evil  effects  of  his  own  nature.  In  the_^ 
ethical  and  theological  controversies  which  sprung  up  to  answer 
Hobbes's  challenge,  it  is  interesting  to  note  that  the  same  diver- 
gence of  opinion  reappears  which,  after  Aristotle,  split  Greek 
philosophical  schools  into  Stoic  and  Epicurean ;  but  with  this 
difference.  The  school  of  thinkers  which  represent  the  positive\ 
and  distinctively  modern  position  in  English  ethics,  based  its  prin-  j 
ciples  on  a  hedonistic  interpretation  of  man's  nature,  resting,  to  a 
greater  or  lesser  degree,  on  Hobbes's  naturalistic  psychology; 
while  the  negative  and  protesting  school  in  the  persons  of  tRe 
Cambridge  Platonists  and  the  rational  theologians,  following,  in 
the  main,  the  classical  tradition,  based  their  arguments  against 
Hobbes  and  the  modern  form  of  hedonism,  on  their  own  inter- 
pretation of  Platonic  or  Aristotelian  idealism. 


2  2  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

Though  Hobbes  to  a  very  great  extent  gave  the  impulse  to 
modern  ethical  speculation  by  his  revolt  from  the  rationalistic 
psychology  and  the  traditional  scholastic  philosophy  of  his  time, 
and  by  his  analysis  of  human  nature  as  he  understood  it,  driven 
to  action  by  passion,  naturally  at  war  with  all  mankind  and  yet 
withal  fearful  and  timorous ;  yet  his  work  was  too  extreme,  too 
widely  opposed  to  the  best  thought  and  feeling  of  his  time  to 
serve  as  the  corner-stone  of  a  school  of  philosophy  or  morals. 
Schools  grew  up  refuting  and  recasting  his  opinions.  The  theo- 
logians flew  to  arms  to  save  the  world  from  worse  than  Epicurean 
degradation.  Those  thinkers  sympathetic  with  his  point  of  view 
in  directly  appealing  to  the  facts  of  life  for  the  foundation  of  a 
system  of  morals,  rather  than  to  metaphysical  theory,  hesitated  to 
champion  the  doctrine  of  universal  selfishness.  The  religious 
ardour  of  the  Reformation  was  too  near,  and  the  general  level  of 
philosophic  thinking  in  the  seventeenth  century  was  too  high,  for 
the  crude  materialism  of  the  Hobbian  philosophy  or  the  political 
opportunism  of  the  Hobbian  morals  to  be  accepted  in  toto  for  the 
guidance  of  life.  It  added  fuel  to  the  fires  of  polemic,  and  deter- 
mined the  direction  in  which  ethical  thinking  was  to  proceed  for 
nearly  two  hundred  years,  but  it  remained  an  individual  interpre- 
tation, not  an  ethical  guide-book. 

Half  a  century  after  the  publication  of  the  "Leviathan,"  Hume 
~~  sought  to  unravel  the  twisted  strands  of  ethical  theory  that  had 
grown  almost  hopelessly  confused  in  the  controversies  between 
Rationalists,  Intellectualists,  Intuitionists  and  the  Moral  Sense 
School,  all  denouncing  or  upholding  Hobbes's  naturalistic  posi- 
tion. In  Hume's  two  ethical  works,  the  "Treatise  of  Human 
Nature"  and  the  "Enquiry  Concerning  the  Principle  of  Morals," 
certaia„concepts  which— mere   snnrres   of   rnniusion-Jn  current 

r ethical  discussion  were  analysed  and  rendered  admirably  clear. 
One  of  the  most  important  of  Hume's  many  contributions  to 
ethical  theory  was  his  statement  of  the  difference  between  the 
intellectual  and  the  moral  faculties,  the  great  point  of  controversy 
between  the  Rationalists  and  the  Moral  Sense  philosophers.  The 
intellect,  Hume  conceived  of  as  passive.     Sense  impressions  are 

/ 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS.  23 

given,  are  associated  according  to  certain  laws,  and  are  known  as 
Ideas.  Moral  facts,  however,  are  directly  perceived  by  a  Moral 
Sense,  which  is  an  active  inner  function,  and  which  submits 
the  facts  perceived  to  an  inner  standard.  "Actions  may  be  laud- 
able or  blameable ;  but  they  cannot  be  reasonable  or  unreasonable : 
Laudable  and  blameable,  therefore,  are  not  the  same  with  reason- 
able or  unreasonable.  The  merit  and  demerit  of  actions  frequently 
contradict,  and  sometimes  control  our  natural  propensities. 
But  reason  has  no  such  influence.  Moral  distinctions,  therefore, 
are  not  the  offspring  of  reason.  Reason  is  wholly  inactive, 
and  can  never  be  the  source  of  so  active  a  principle  as  conscience, 

or  a  sense  of  morals."^" 

— ^ 
Had  Hume  set  to  work  to  analyse  the  operations  of  the  Moral    ■ 

Sense  with  the  acumen   with  which   he  performed   his   logical 
analysis,  the  history  of  utilitarian  morals  might  never  have  been 
written.    But  Hume  was  too  much  a  disciple  of  Hobbes,  and  too 
distrustful  of  a  faculty  which  judged  immediately  with  reference 
to  an  ideal  of  right  and  wrong,  to  be  content  to  say,  "Man  is  a 
moral   being,   and  not  a  natural   creature,   and   the  content   of     j 
morality  is  to  be  found  in  studying  the  operation  of  his  moral 
sense,  and  the  nature  of  his  moral  acts."    Having  postulated  an     / 
immediate  moral  sense,  Hume  analysed  it  no  further,  but  turned    l 
to  seek  the  foundation  principle  of  morals  in  an  analysis  of  Per-    ^ 
sonal  Merit,  or  of  those  human  qualities  which  we  judge  to  be 
admirable;  proceeding  from  what  he  considered  to  be  the  "un- 
doubted maxim,  that  no  action  can  be  virtuous,  or  morally  good, 
unless  there  be  in  human  nature  some  motive  to  produce  it,  dis- 
tinct from  the  sense  of  its  morality."" 

In  this  investigation  Hume  abandoned  the  rationalistic  method 
of  deduction  from  axioms,  and  used  the  method  of  science.  He 
studied  the  nature  of  the  various  admirable  qualities  or  virtues ; 
justice,  benevolence,  equity,  and  others.  As  the  result  of  his 
investigation  he  found  that  all  the  qualities  which  we  designate 
as  virtuous  arouse  in  us  pleasurable  sensations  and  all  vicious  and  / 

*.!l'Treatise  of  Human  Nature,"  Clarendon-Jgress,  p.  458. 
"I.  c.  479^ •  '--^ 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

evil  qualities  correspondingly  painful  ones.  Further  analysis 
reveals  four  sources  of  pleasure-pain,  or  rather  four  principles 
which  serve  to  distinguish  between  virtue  and  vice.  "For  we 
reap  a  pleasure  from  the  view  of  a  character  which  is  naturally 
fitted  to  be  useful  to  others,  or  to  the  person  himself,  or  which  is 
agreeable  to  others,  or  to  the  person  himself."^^  This  fourfold 
division  of  qualities  useful  and  agreeable  to  ourselves,  and  quali- 
ties useful  and  agreeable  to  others,  becomes  the  basis  of  the 
chapter  division  of  Hume's  later  work,  the  "Enquiry  Concerning 
the  Principles  of  Morals."  His  position  is  stated  clearly  in  the 
Appendix  to  the  Enquiry,  "The  hypothesis  which  we  embrace  is 
plain.  It  maintains  that  morality  is  determined  by  sentiment.  It 
\defines  virtue  to  be  whatever  mental  action  or  quality  gives  to  the 
spectator  the  pleasing  sentiment  of  approbation,  and  vice  the 
contrary. "^^  And  the  ultimate  source  of  this  "pleasing  sentiment 
df  approbation"  is  the  usefulness  or  agreeableness  of  the  action 
or  quality  to  ourselves  or  to  others. 

In  other  words,  the  criterion  which  may  be  applied  to  test  Jiie 
^pefcgrtiqnsiiilJtllBlzMofa!^^  Horeover,    this 

criterion  Hume  rightly  declared  must  be  a  general  concept,  which 
may  be  applied  to  particular  cases  to  test  their  ethical  validity :  it 
must  be  utility  for  the  true  interest  of  mankind.  He  thus  avoided 
the  error  of  the  Common  Sense  school,  which  in  asserting  an 
immediate  and  personal  perception  of  right  and  wrong,  admitted 
no  universal  standard  of  ethical  judgment,  and  in  cases  of  error 
and  disagreement  reduced  moral  judgments  to  a  matter  of  per- 
sonal opinion.  Moral  judgments,  Hume  rightly  perceived,  could 
have  no  universal  validity  unless  the  moral  standard  were  capable 
of  universal  application  in  particular  instances,  as  the  intellectual 
standard  of  consistency  may  be  applied  to  facts  of  truth  and  false- 
hood. 

f"^  Having  discovered   in   his   analysis   of   Personal   Merit,   that 
\  ^'utility  for  serving  the  true  interests  of  mankind"  is  partly,  at 
least,  the  ground  for  our  approbation  of  virtuous  conduct,  Hume 

"Hume's  "Treatise  of  Human  Nature,"  Clarendon  Press  edition,  p.  591. 
"Hume's  "Enquiry  Concerning  Morals,"  Clarendon  Press  edition,  p.  289. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS.  25 

concludes  that  the  sentiment  of  Humanity  is  the  basis  of  morals. 
On  account  of  our  interest  in  humanity  alone,  are  we  able  to  have 
a  principle  of  judgment  fitted  to  be  a  moral  principle.  This  senti- 
ment of  humanity,  or  sentiment  of  sympathy,  as  it  appears  in  the 
Treatise,  is  a  natural  sentiment,  "common  to  all  mankind,  which 
recommends  the  same  object  to  general  approbation,  and  makes 
every  man,  or  most  men,  agree  in  the  same  opinion  or  decision 
concerning  it."^*  It  is  moreover  "a  principle  which  accounts  in 
great  part  for  the  origin  of  morality."^^  That  is,  we  find  in 
Hume  analysis  a  second  view  of  man's  moral  nature  and  the 
character  of  the  moral  judgment.  According  to  the  view  already 
indicated,  man  is  endowed  with  an  active  moral  faculty  called  the 
"Moral  Sense,"  which  immediately  perceives  actions,  and  judges 
them  to  be  right  or  wrong,  according  to  an  ideal  standard,  the 
criterion  of  such  judgment  being  utility,  individual  or  social. 
According  to  the  second  view,  human  beings  have  among  other 
sentiments  that  of  sympathy,  humanity  or  fellow-feeling  with  one 
another,  which  "recommends  the  same  object  to  general  appro- 
bation" without  reference  to  a  moral  standard  or  criterion,  and 
which  constitutes  an  independent  "basis  of  morality."  It  is 
interesting  to  notice  in  this  connection  that  the  latter  view  of 
morality  coincides  with  the  view  of  sympathy  as  the  basis  of 
morals  put  forth  by  Hume's  life-long  friend  and  critic,  Adam 
Smith,  in  his  "Theory  of  the  Moral  Sentiment."  Both  accounts 
are  naturalistic  in  that  they  deny  to  man  a  moral  nature  or  the 
capacity  for  making  moral  judgments,  and  attribute  the  content 
of  morality  to  the  operation  of  a  natural  sentiment. 

Hume's  work  may  be  regarded,  either  in  the  light  of  a  com- 
promise;— that  is,  an  endeavor  to  reconcile  the  naturalistic  hypoth- 
esis with  a  Moral  Sense,  or  as  the  product  of  a  mind  grasping 
intuitively  beyond  the  concepts  of  his  times  to  a  truer  and  deeper 
interpretation  of  man's  moral  nature.  He  says,  "We  may  easily 
remove  any  contradictions  which  may  appear  to  be  betwixt  the 
extensive  sympathy  on  which  our  sentiment  of  virtue  depends, 


15 


Hume's  "Enquiry,"  p.  272. 
1.  cit.,  p.  219. 


26  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC   JUDGMENT. 

and  that  limited  generosity  which  I  have  frequently  observed  to 
be  natural  to  men."     Benevolence  and  Self-love  are  not  neces- 
sarily antithetical  elements  in  man,  but  may  be  supplementary 
factors  in  an  organic  unity.  ■ 
/■    But  Hume's  account  was  not  conclusive.  The  great  problem  for 
/     the  eighteenth  century  moralist  was  to  find  some  motive  in  human 
nature  strong  enough  to  account  for  morality.     Why  should  a 
man  act  morally,  or  for  the  good  of  others  at  personal  sacrifice, 
when  his  natural  instincts  impel  him  only  to  seek  pleasure  and 
avoid  pain?    How  can  there  be  a  question  of  moral  choice  when 
the  strongest  pleasurable  or  painful  sensation,  according  to  the 
current  psychology,  must  determine  the  will?     In  spite  of  ques- 
tionings, morality  remained  a  persistent  fact,  inexplicable  on  a 
___  naturalistic  hypothesis. 

y^  But  though  morality  be  an  admitted  fact,  it  still  might  be  an 
j    arbitrary  one ;  according  to  Hobbes,  it  was  a  creation  of  policy 
/    and  convention,  upon  which  view  society  and  civil  and  religious 
A  I    institutions  were  as  houses  built  upon  the  sand.  Hobbes's  account 
^      Tt^  the  agreement  of  the  multitude  to  maintain  a  mutual  peace  failed 
'  /    to  give  any  assurance  of  stability,  even  when  the  agreement  was 

fortified  by  the  decrees  of  the  Leviathan.  The  "mutual  peace" 
\  might  be  overturned  at  any  moment  by  the  same  multitude  in  a 
X^oncerted  act  of  will,  by  a  single  decree  of  the  Leviathan.  Hume's 
qualified  Moral  Sense,  and  sentiments  of  humanity  or  sympathy, 
were  too  shadowy,  too  much  at  the  mercy  of  the  stronger  selfish 
instincts,  which  both  philosophers  admitted  as  essential  character- 
istics of  human  nature.  All  the  arguments  which  Hume  could 
bring  to  bear  from  other  sources: — the  universal  sentiment  of 
sympath}^  and  humanity,  the  fact  that  pleasure  came  to  be  associ- 
ated with  virtue,  and  pain  with  vice,  that  qualities  useful  and 
agreeable  to  others  influence  us  as  well  as  those  directly  affecting 
ourselves, — failed  to  make  the  moral  law  obligatory  in  private  or 
in  public  life,  once  it  were  admitted  that  all  conduct  is  determined 
by  an  expected  excess  of  pleasure  over  pain.  Accordingly,  we 
find  the  trend  of  ethical  thought  after  Hume  turning  from  an 
analytical  study  of  human  nature  to  search  for  some  external 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY   IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS.  27 

authority  or  sanction  to  support  the  moral  element  in  human 
nature  which  seemed  at  the  mercy  of  all  the  lower  passions  and 
instincts. 

Paley  takes  issue  with  Hume  on  just  this  point.  Hume  had  Paley. 
complained  of  the  "modern  scheme  of  uniting  ethicks  with  Chris- 
tian theology:"  Paley,  an  uncompromising  theologian,  claims 
that  without  the  theological  sanction  there  is  nothing  binding  in 
morality.  In  criticising  Hume's  "Treatise"  he  says : — "When  they 
have  read  it  over,  let  them  consider  whether  any  motives  there 
proposed  are  likely  to  be  found  sufficient  to  withhold  men  from 
the  gratification  of  lust,  revenge,  envy,  ambition,  avarice;  or  to 
prevent  the  existence  of  those  passions.  Unless  they  rise  from 
this  celebrated  essay  with  stronger  impression  in  their  mind  than 
it  ever  left  upon  mine,  they  will  acknowledge  the  necessity  of 
additional  sanctions. "^^  These  "additional  sanctions,"  or  external 
props  to  morality,  Paley  frankly  recognises  as  the  nexus  of  his  • 
system. 

Paley's  "Principles  of  Moral  and  Political  Philosophy"  is 
admirably  clear  and  concise,  and  a  direct  contrast  to  Hume's  less 
consistent  but  more  suggestive  work.  Paley  is  a  typical  exponent 
of  eighteenth  century  theology.  He  is  brilliant,  pointed  and  con- 
vincing, but  shallow  and  unanalytic.  But  he  is  frankly  hedonistic, 
and  inclined  to  look  at  society  as  a  machine,  and  human  institu- 
tions as  "contrivances." 

He  prefaces  to  his  "Principles  of  Morals"  a  naturalistic 
account  of  man's  psychological  nature.  He  denies  Hume's 
"Moral  Sense"  as  well  as  the  Innate  Ideas  of  the  rationalists. 
Certain  actions  are  approved  and  others  disapproved  by  the  pro- 
cess of  association,  whereby  pleasure  is  associated  with  good 
action  and  pain  with  evil.  Good  actions  tend  to  be  repeated  on 
account  of  the  human  propensity  to  imitate.  Happiness,  inter- 
preted hedonistically,  is  the  End  of  Life.  "Any  condition  may 
be  denominated  happy  in  which  the  amount  or  aggregate  of 
pleasure   exceeds    that   of   pain ;   and   the   degree    of   happiness 

"Paley,  "Moral  Philosophy,"  p.  66,  Vol.   I,   Belcher  edition    (5  vols.), 
1810. 


28  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

depends  upon  the  quantity  of  this  excess."^'^     Pleasures,  more- 
over, "differ  in  nothing  by  continuance  and  intensity." 

But  Paley  hesitated  to  champion  too  consistently  a  doctrine 
which  would  lead  him  to  the  Hobbian  assumption  of  universal 
selfishness,  and  he  hastens  to  add,  "Happiness  does  not  consist 
in  pleasures  of  sense,  in  whatever  profusion  or  variety  they  may 
be  enjoyed  ....  nor  doth  it  consist  in  exemption  from 
pain,  labour,  care,  business,  expense,  molestation  ....  such 
a  state  being  usually  attended  not  with  ease,  but  with  depression 
of  spirits"  ;^*  nor  again  "doth  happiness  consist  in  greatness, 
rank,  or  elevated  station. "^^  Paley  recognises  that  the  essentials 
of  human  happiness  lie  in  activity.  It  is  to  be  found  in  the 
"exercise  of  our  faculties  either  of  body  or  mind  in  some  engag- 
ing end."^*'  But  Paley  does  not  investigate  the  nature  of  the 
"engaging  end." 

Apart  from  the  natural  inclinations  of  men,  however,  we  find 
existing  in  the  world  the  rules  and  dictates  of  morality.  These 
enjoin  upon  man  the  necessity  of  acting  for  his  future  as  well  as 
for  his  present  happiness ;  which  means  acting  according  to 
Virtue.  Virtue,  thus  conceived  as  an  external,  non-natural 
quality,  existing  in  the  world  and  dominating  conduct,  is  defined 
as  "doing  good  to  mankind,  in  obedience  to  the  Will  of  God ;  and 
for  the  sake  of  everlasting  happiness. "^^  According  to  which 
definition,  "the  good  of  mankind  is  the  subject,  the  will  of  God 
the  rule ;  and  everlasting  happiness  the  motive  of  human 
virtue. "^^  In  these  few  words  Paley  sums  up  his  system.  Man, 
considered  as  a  natural  creature,  has  no  motive  to  act  except 
according  to  his  desires  for  personal  happiness.  Therefore  to 
account  for  the  many  moral  motives  which  are  seen  to  operate  in 
the  world,  he  must  be  externally  compelled  by  the  will  of  God, 

"Paley,  "Principles  of  Morals,"  Vol.  I,  p.  39. 

"1.  c,  p.  41. 

'n.  c,  p.  43. 

"1.  c.  p.  45. 

"1.  c,  p.  51. 

''I.  c,  p.  61. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


29 


with  the  hopes  of  everlasting  happiness  held  up  before  his  eyes 
as  a  reward  for  well-doing.  If  man  is  denied  a  moral  nature,  the 
safety  and  good  of  society  can  only  be  safeguarded  against 
excesses  of  the  selfish  instincts  by  the  supernatural  intervention 
of  the  will  of  God. 

This  naturalistic  and  non-moral  account  of  human  nature 
appears  more  clearly  when  Paley  turns  to  investigate  the  nature 
of  Obligation.  Why  is  man  obliged  to  obey  even  the  will  of  God? 
And  Paley  answers,  "A  man  is  said  to  be  obliged,  when  he  is 
urged  by  a  violent  motive  resulting  from  the  command  of 
another."  The  wdiole  moral  code  therefore  is  reduced  to  the 
dictum :  "private  happiness  is  our  motive,  and  the  will  of  God  our 
rule."^^  In  order  to  ascertain  the  will  of  God,  "we  must  inquire 
into  the  general  tendency  of  the  action  to  promote  or  diminish  the 
general  happiness.  This  rule  proceeds  upon  the  presumption  that 
God  Almighty  wills  and  wishes  the  happiness  of  his  creatures, 
and  consequently  that  those  actions  that  promote  that  will  and 
wish,  must  be  agreeable  to  him,  and  the  contrary."^*  Paley 
reaches  the  conclusion,  that  God  as  essential  goodness  must  will 
the  greatest  happiness  to  mankind,  by  a  most  characteristic  bit 
of  argument.  "When  Almighty  God  created  the  human  species, 
he  wished  their  happiness,  or  he  wished  their  misery,  or  he  was 
indifferent  and  unconcerned  about  both.  If  he  had  wished  our 
misery,  he  might  have  made  sure  of  his  purpose  by  fomiing  our 
senses  to  be  so  many  sores  and  pains  to  us  .  .  .  .  If  he  had 
been  indifferent  to  our  happiness  or  misery,  we  must  impute  to 
our  good-fortune  ....  the  capacity  of  our  senses  to  receive 
pleasure  ....  But  either  of  these  being  too  much  to  be 
attributed  to  accident,  nothing  remains  but  the  first  supposition, 
that  God,  when  he  created  the  human  species,  wished  their  happi- 
ness."" 

Thus  Paley  scores  a  point  against  such  rational  theologians 
as  Cudworth  and  Clark,  with  their  vague  principle  of  identity 

^I.  c,  p.  63. 
"I.  c,  p.  67. 
'•'1.  c,  p.  70. 


30  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

between  object  and  idea,  by  being  able  to  point  to  a  definite  cri- 
terion of  right.  "It  is  the  utiHty  of  any  moral  rule,  which  alone 
constitutes  the  obligation  to  it."  If  we  ask,  for  what  end  is  this 
action  useful,  Paley  answers : — ^"the  general  happiness,  which 
indicates  what  is  right,  and  consequently  what  is  the  will  of 
God." 

Any  naturalistic  account  of  man  leaving  out  regulative  ideals 
and  the  possibility  of  judging  right  or  wrong  with  respect  to 
them  must  necessarily  lead  to  the  supernaturalism  so  evident  in 
Paley 's  system  of  morals.  If  man  is  governed  by  purely  natural 
motives,  certain  great  classes  of  phenomena  fail  to  be  accounted 
for ;  generosity,  sacrifice,  all  forms  of  altruism,  activity  for 
reform  and  social  service.  If  these  attributes  are  not  natural 
and  the  products  of  pleasure-pain,  they  must  be  supernatural, 
or  the  manifestations  of  a  superior  will.  If  these  elements  in  life 
which  seem  to  be  the  most  valuable,  and  the  most  admirable  of 
human  qualities,  are  yet  not  natural  to  man,  their  existence  in 
the  world  must  be  enforced  supernaturally,  by  the  direct  interven- 
tion of  God.  So  Paley  met  the  demand  for  safeguarding  morality 
by  supplying  a  theological  prop  to  man's  failing  nature.  The 
fear  of  future  punishment,  and  the  hope  of  future  rewards  con- 
strain man  to  act  morally,  and  thus  against  his  real  human 
nature. 

Paley  thus  presented  a  definite  system  freed  from  the  ambi- 
guities and  uncertainties  of  Hume,  or  the  works  of  the  Common 
Sense  school.  The  account  of  human  nature  is  still  naturalistic, 
and  the  stubborn  facts  of  moral  acts  and  moral  judgments  which 
failed  of  an  explanation  on  any  naturalistic  psychology,  were  arbi- 
trarily accounted  for  as  the  injunctions  of  a  supernatural  Being. 
Paley's  advance  over  the  Hobbesian  naturalism  lies  in  his  recogni- 
tion that  happiness  is  not  mere  sensation,  or  an  idea  of  a  sum  of 
sensation,  but  is  actively  a  process  of  attaining  some  "engaging 
end."  He  also  emphasises  Hume's  use  of  utility  as  a  criterion 
for  determining  right  action,  in  place  of  the  rationalistic  criterion 
of  mere  identity.  Actions  are  to  be  universally  estimated  by  their 
tendency.   Whatever  is  expedient  is  right.   "It  is  the  utility  of  any 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS.  31 

moral  rule  which  alone  constitutes  the  obligation  to  it."-°  Utility 
as  a  universal  criterion  for  moral  judgments  is  a  long  step  in 
advance  of  Hobbes's  concept  of  morality  as  prudential  restraint ; 
but  utility  for  Paley  does  not  signify  what  it  meant  for  Hume. 
Utility  for  Hume  is  a  criterion — a  universal  term  by  means  of 
which  a  moral  being  tests  his  own  judgments  of  right  and  wrong-. 
This  action  is  right  and  praiseworthy.  Why?  Because  it  is 
agreeable  to  me,  or  to  other  people ;  or  because  it  serves  a  per- 
sonal or  social  end.  Another  action  as  judged  wrong  or  unworthy 
and  when  tested  by  the  moral  criterion  is  found  to  be  subversive 
of  personal  or  social  ends. 

But  for  Paley  utility  is  not  the  criterion  of  the  judgments 
of  a  free  moral  being,  but  of  the  will  of  a  supernatural  agent. 
"The  criterion  of  right  is  utility,-^  ....  but  because  moral 
obligations  depend,  as  we  have  seen,  upon  the  Will  of  God,  right 
which  is  correlative  to  it  must  depend  on  the  same.  Right,  there- 
fore, signifies  consistency  with  the  Will  of  God.'"^^  Paley, 
therefore,  admits  utility  as  the  criterion  of  moral  judgments,  but 
does  not  admit  man's  capacity  to  judge  morally.  His  system  is 
thus  more  naturalistic  than  Hume's,  and  more  consistent.  A 
creature  constrained  to  act  by  an  anticipated  excess  of  pleasur- 
able or  painful  sensation,  could  not  be  expected  to  make  free 
moral  judgments.  His  obligation  to  act  morally  therefore,  comes 
not  from  his  own  nature  but  from  the  will  of  God. 

The  last  quarter  of  the  eighteenth  century  saw  a  rapid  trans- 
formation and  readjustment  "of  social  and  industrial  conditions, 
which  caused  the  speculative  men  of  the  times  to  turn  from  the 
abstract,  theological  and  rational  systems  of  Paley  and  his  fellow- 
theologians,  to  deal  with  the  immediate  and  pressing  problems  of 
the  day.  Morality,  they  claimed,  must  not  only  give  a  true 
account  of  human  nature,  but  it  must  provide  some  positive 
standard  to  serve  as  the  criterion  of  practical  reform. 

""Principles  of  Morals,"  Vol.  I,  p.  70. 
='!.  c,  p.  71. 
"^1.  c.  p.  78. 


32  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

mtham.  Bentham's  "Principles  of  Morals  and  Legislation"  (1789), 
containing  in  substance  his  whole  theory  of  ethics,  appeared  three 
years  after  Paley's  "Principles  of  Philosophy."  The  account  of 
human  nature,  of  morality  and  the  logical  processes  upon  which 
the»system  of  morality  is  derived,  are  almost  identical  in  the  two 
books,  but  while  Paley's  "Principles"  is  relegated  to  the  theo- 
logical philosophy  of  the  eighteenth  century,  Bentham's  "Morals 
and  Legislation"  became  the  text-book  of  the  early  nineteenth 
century  political  and  social  reformers.  Bentham  added  nothing 
at  all  to  the  utilitarian  theory  of  morals,  as  many  of  his  com- 
mentators have  taken  great  pains  to  point  out.  He  is  indebted  to 
Gay,  Tucker,  Hutchinson  ,and  Hume  for  his  psychology,  indeed, 
for  the  very  content  of  his  theory.  His  logic  is  the  logic  of  Paley. 
But  the  form  into  which  he  cast  utilitarian  theory  marks  the 
beginning  of  a  new  epoch,  and  the  importance  of  the  change 
cannot  be  too  strongly  emphasised.  Moral  theory  which  in  the 
eighteenth  century  was  the  subject  of  academic  discussion,  and 
theological  polemic,  was  transformed  by  Bentham's  legal  and 
codifying  mind  into  a  practical  utilitarian  platform  for  political 
and  social  reform. 

But  to  appreciate  the  full  significance  of  this  change  in  the 
character  of  ethical  thinking,  which  occasioned  Bentham's  work, 
and  typifies  the  early  nineteenth  century  attitude  toward  morality, 
it  is  necessary  to  note  the  social  and  political  background,  the 
changed  industrial  conditions  and  reorganised  social  classes  which 
brought  forth  the  new  point  of  view.  In  the  first  volume  of  "Eng- 
lish Utilitarianism"  Leslie  Stephen  has  given  a  very  graphic  and 
delightful  account  of  the  social,  industrial  and  intellectual  life 
in  England,  which  is  the  proper  setting  to  study  Bentham,  and  the 
work  of  the  early  "utilitarians."  These  conditions  can  only  be 
very  briefly  indicated  in  the  space  of  this  study,  but  they  are 
essential  in  bringing  out  the  significance  of  Bentham's  place  in 
the  history  of  utilitarian  theory  and  the  reason  why  his  version 
of  utilitarianism,  and  not  that  of  Hume  or  Paley  became  influ- 
ential in  English  ethical  and  economic  theory.  And  in  passing 
from  the  theoretical  and  academic  discussion  of  morals  which 


THE   CONCEPT   OF   UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS.  33 

characterised  the  eighteenth  century  thinkers,  to  the  statement 
of  utihtarianism  as  an  explicit  code  for  poHtical  and  social  re- 
form, the  utilitarian  philosophers  came  to  base  their  theory  on 
an  assumption  not  consistent  with  the  naturalistic  psychology 
of  the  earlier  hedonists ;  namely,  that  the  end  of  all  moral  action, 
whether  individual  or  social,  is  for  the  good  of  the  whole  public 
welfare,  or  as  it  came  to  be  called  later  the  "greatest  happiness 
principle." 

Bentham,  bringing  the  whole  force  of  his  legal  knowledge  and 
acumen  to  bear  on  current  moral  theory,  saw  as  clearly  as  Paley 
that  if  morality  were  denied  to  the  nature  of  man,  it  must  rest 
on  arbitrary  assumptions,  and  be  externally  enforced  by  some 
power  or  authority.  This  necessary  and  external  prop  to  moral- 
ity, Bentham  conceived  to  lie  in  the  terror  and  majesty  of  the 
temporal  law.  But  the  law  itself  is  a  social  institution:  its 
dictates  express  the  fundamental  convictions  of  society.  It  does 
not  favour  any  individual,  nor  indeed  the  interests  of  all 
individuals,  but  always  serves  and  protects  the  majority  or  "the 
greatest  number."  And  though  Bentham  prefaces  his  "Theory 
of  Morals  and  Legislation"  with  an  analysis  of  human  attributes, 
and  a  codification  of  human  faculties  (Leslie  Stephen  calls 
Bentham  the  "codifying  animal")  along  the  lines  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century  moral  philosophers,  his  theory  of  conduct  is  de- 
signed to  grapple  with  social  and  political  problems; — with  the 
"greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number." 

The  social  and  industrial  England  which  was  the  background 
for  Benthamism  and  the  new  utilitarianism,  exhibited  much  of 
the  insecurity  and  tendency  to  unexpected  explosiveness  which 
proverbially  characterises  old  bottles  charged  with  new  wine. 
Despite  the  change  in  national  character  due  to  the  growth  of 
industries  during  the  last  half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  certain 
hard  and  fast  social  classifications  remained  as  the  inheritance 
of  centuries  of  agricultural  power.  The  wealth  of  the  country  had 
originally  come  from  agriculture ;  the  ruling  power  was  concen- 
trated in  the  hands  of  the  land-owning  estate.  In  the  days  before 
the  reform  agitation,  Parliament,  and  thus  all  financial  legislation, 


34  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

was  in  the  hands  of  the  landed  aristocracy.  The  same  class  con- 
trolled all  appointments  in  the  army  and  navy ;  and  all  the  offices 
in  the  Church  of  England.  The  Universities,  which  served  as 
steps  to  ecclesiastical  preferment,  depended  to  a  great  extent  on 
the  landed  interest  for  support  and  endowment,  and  for  place  and 
promotion  for  their  students.  And  finally,  the  administration  of 
justice,  in  the  hands  of  county  justices  of  peace,  was  usually  the 
privilege  of  the  heads  or  representatives  of  the  county  families. 
Thus  Parliament  with  the  financial  and  legislative  functions, 
army  and  navy.  Church  and  State ;  in  fact  all  legislative,  execu- 
tive and  judicial  power,  was  concentrated  in  the  hands  of  a  single 
class, — the  landed  aristocracy,  representing  the  agricultural 
wealth  of  the  country.  As  Leslie  Stephen  puts  it,  "the  early 
centralisation  of  the  English  Monarchy  had  made  the  law 
supreme,  and  instead  of  generating  a  new  structure  had  com- 
bined and  regulated  the  existing  social  forces.  The  sovereign 
power  was  thus  formed  to  the  aristocracy  instead  of  forming  an 
organ  of  its  own."^''  This  class  having  all  duties,  as  well  as  all 
privileges,  asserted  its  political  position  in  terms  of  eighteenth  cen- 
tury individualism.  Their  political  creed  was  not  based  on  an 
economic  interpretation.  They  did  not  say,  "Certain  classes  rule 
and  have  privilege  because  they  control  the  wealth  of  the  nation 
and  so  can  concentrate  power."  But  according  to  their  political 
philosophy,  certain  men  by  nature  and  in  virtue  of  their  class  in 
society  are  £t  to  rule  and  hold  office.  It  remained  for  the  utili- 
tarian reformers  to  question  the  divine  right  of  this  "nature"  and 
to  deny  the  fitness. 

After  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century,  the  landed  inter- 
ests, though  retaining  the  perquisites  of  their  earlier  supremacy, 
had  ceased  to  be  the  main  source  of  wealth  in  England.  Manu- 
facturing interests,  which  had  been  steadily  spreading  for  over 
a  century,  received  a  tremendous  impetus  in  the  increased  foreign 
trade,  and  coincident  development  of  machinery  and  technique 
which  marked  the  last  decades  of  the  century.  Two  new  social 
classes  became  prominent  for  the  first  time ;  the  industrial  work- 

^Leslie  Stephen,  "The  English  Utilitarians,"  Vol.  I,  p.  53. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


35 


ing  class,  which  thronged  the  factory  towns,  and  redistributed 
population  so  effectively  that  Parliamentary  reform  became  an 
issue  with  the  rise  of  the  modern  factory  system ;  and  the  class 
of  industrial  operators,  the  manufacturers.  This  latter  group  of 
men  rose  in  most  cases  from  the  ranks  of  the  labourers  by  their 
industry  and  ingenuity,  and  are  a  force  to  be  reckoned  with  in 
any  account  of  ethical,  political  or  economic  opinion  of  this  time. 
The  history  is  yet  to  be  written  of  the  influence  on  current  spec- 
ulative and  practical  opinion  of  such  men  as  Arkwright  the  in- 
ventor, Wedgewood  the  potter,  Francis  Place  the  tailor,  Telford, 
Watt,  Hargreaves,  Compton  and  many  others  who  have  been 
hitherto  known  only  from  their  industrial  or  technical  achieve- 
ments. They  are  known  as  the  inventors  and  as  the  founders  of 
the  great  English  industries,  the  men  who  prepared  the  way  for 
the  industrial  development  of  the  nineteenth  century.  They  left 
an  equally  enduring  mark  on  English  thought,  not  only  on  the  fav- 
orite subject  for  speculation,  moral  philosophy,  but  on  political 
theory,  and  most  especially  on  the  new  science  growing  out  of 
the  condition  thus  indicated,  called  "Political  Economy." 

Many  of  these  men  were  friends  of  Bentham,  the  exponent  of 
current  moral  theory,  as  well  as  the  maker  of  legal  codes,  and 
of  Adam  Smith,  the  prophet  of  the  new  industrialism  and  the 
"Father  of  English  Political  Economy."  In  the  several  scientific 
and  philosophical  societies  founded  in  the  rapidly  growing  fac- 
tory towns,  of  which  the  "Lunar  Society"  at  Birmingham  and  the 
"Literary  and  Philosophical  Society"  at  Manchester  were  the 
most  eminent,  all  the  social,  political  and  economic  problems  of 
the  day  came  up  for  discussion,  as  well  as  matters  of  literary  and 
scientific  interest.  The  list  of  membership  of  these  societies  shows 
that  the  "manufacturers"  were  affiliated  with  the  best  scientific 
and  philosophic  minds  of  the  times.  When  we  consider  that 
these  pioneers  of  industry,  trained  in  the  hard  school  of  poverty 
and  toil,  were  living  in  a  country  politically  corrupt,  whose 
ruling  class  was  maintaining  the  established  order  through  their 
control  of  office,  and  were  practically  excluding  from  participa- 
tion in  Government  those  very  industrial  interests,  which  later 


^6  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

were  destined  to  make  England  a  world  power  in  a  sense  not 
dreamed  of  by  the  eighteenth  century  Physiocrats,  it  is  small 
wonder  that  when  the  "manufacturers"  turned  their  attention  to 
righting  existing  evils,  and  formulating  a  platform  of  reform, 
their  ethics  were  strictly  practical  and  utilitarian,  and  their 
theory  of  wealth  was  expressed  in  terms  of  abstinence  and  toil. 

The  evils  of  the  times  which  caused  all  thoughtful  men  to 
consider  the  necessity  of  some  concrete  standard  of  right  as  the 
basis  of  effective  reform,  had  flourished,  so  to  speak,  in  the  very 
shadow  of  the  English  Constitution.  The  policy  of  allowing  the 
maximum  of  liberty  to  the  individual,  with  the  minimum  of  gov- 
ernmental interference,  had  allowed  the  land-owning  classes  to 
control  administrative  functions,  and  made  possible  the  rapid 
development  of  industry  and  manufacture,  but  offered  no  alle- 
viation for  the  increasingly  disadvantageous  position  of  the 
labouring  classes.  Furthermore  the  very  nature  of  the  industrial 
development  brought  great  distress  to  thousands  of  working 
people.  The  rapid  substitution  of  machinery  for  hand-labour 
turned  whole  groups  of  industrial  workers  out  of  employment. 
Less  hands  were  needed  in  the  new  organization  than  under  the 
old  regime ;  and  cut-throat  competition  drove  down  the  wages 
of  those  labourers  finding  work  in  the  reconstructed  organisa- 
tion, with  the  resulting  rioting  and  disorders  which  darkened 
the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century.  In  the  absence  of  adequate 
police  systems  in  many  of  the  rapidly  growing  factory  towns, 
and  most  especially  in  the  city  of  London,  pauperism  became  a 
menace  to  peace  and  order. ^*^  The  traditional  and  mediaeval  sys- 
tem of  town  government  had  died  out  or  broken  down  under  the 
changing  industrial  conditions,  and  municipal  administration  was 
at  its  lowest  point  of  efficiency.  Towns  were  without  charters, 
without  adequate  prisons,  hospitals  or  police  force.  The  criminal 
code,  the  accumulation  of  centuries  of  custom,  precedent  and 
enactments  without  adequate  codification,  either  punished  inhu- 
manely or  allowed  clever  criminals  to  slip  through  the  grasp  of 
the  law.     These  conditions  were  further  aggravated  by  the  lack 

'"Leslie  Stephens,  1.  c,  Vol.  I,  Chap.  III. 


THE  CONCEPT  OF  UTILITY  IN  ENGLISH  ETHICS.  37 

of  any  national  system  of  education.  So  that  in  addition  to  the 
evils  of  pauperism  and  crime  the  greater  part  of  the  labouring 
population  were  grossly  ignorant. 

All  the  efforts  made  to  alleviate  the  condition  of  the  poor  were 
the  work  of  private  individuals.  The  period  marks  a  series  of 
social  experiments  which  were  immensely  valuable  in  later  re- 
form legislation.  Poor-law  bills  were  presented  to  Parliament. 
Prison  reform  and  the  revision  of  the  Criminal  Code  were  the 
subjects  of  many  pamphlets  and  much  investigation.  Industrial 
and  technical  schools,  night  classes  and  Sunday-schools  were 
erected  on  private  foundations.  Robert  Owen,  the  cotton  manu- 
facturer, started  his  socialistic  experiments  in  profit-sharing  at 
New  Lanark ;  Wilberforce  was  agitating  the  country  for  the 
abolition  of  the  slave-trade.  The  whole  era  was  one  of  protest 
and  agitation  for  reform.  The  national  conscience  began  to  stir ; 
the  loss  of  the  American  colonies,  and  the  events  of  the  French 
Revolution  finally  waked  it  up  to  a  startled  self-consciousness. 

With  these  practical  problems  for  reform  in  the  public  mind : 
the  condition  of  the  poor,  the  police-system,  the  criminal-code, 
education,  the  Slave  Trade,  and,  most  fundamental  of  all,  the 
redistribution  of  parliamentary  representation,  it  is  small  w^onder 
that  when  men  of  the  type  of  the  early  industrialists  sought  to 
remedy  the  existing  evils,  they  turned  from  the  abstract  and 
metaphysical  speculations  of  the  moralists  and  theologians  and 
sought  a  practical  statement  of  right  and  wrong  to  serve  as  a 
campaign  platform. 

This  need  Bentham  supplied  to  the  early  nineteenth  century 
political  and  social  reformer.  He  was  trained  as  an  advocate, 
but  never  practised  his  profession,  as  his  whole  interest  lay  not  in 
the  application  of  the  law,  but  in  codifying  and  arranging  existing 
systems,  exposing  fallacies  and  preparing  carefully  worked  out 
schemes  for  reform.  Plis  attitude  toward  morals  was  far  from 
being  the  academic  or  controversial  interest  of  the  eighteenth 
century  thinker.  He  needed,  as  a  man  of  his  times,  a  definite 
standard  of  right,  and  a  theory  of  the  principles  of  human  ac- 
tion to  serve  as  the  foundations  of  his  civil  and  criminal  codes. 


45G615 


38  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

It  has  been  said  of  Bentham  that  he  contributed  nothing  to  the 
utiHtarian  theory  of  morals  but  method.  It  would  be  fairer  to 
say  that  all  the  theory  needed  was  method.  The  content  of  the 
theory  was  at  hand  in  the  works  of  Gay,  Hume,  Hutchinson  and 
Shaftesbury,  and  had  been  put  into  shape  for  Bentham's  purpose 
by  Paley.  But  the  ethical  speculation  of  the  age  was  useless 
unless  formulated  to  apply  practically  to  the  evils  of  the  times. 
Bentham's  work  was  to  take  the  utilitarian  theory  of  the  Paleyan 
type,  and  to  codify  it  in  a  reformer's  "hand-book.  His  ethical 
principles  are  not  elaborated  into  an  all-embracing  system;  they 
are  the  necessary  introduction  to  his  civil  and  criminal  legisla- 
tion. 

The  psychological  groundwork  of  Bentham's  ethics  is  unmis- 
takably naturalistic.  "Nature  has  placed  man  under  the  govern- 
ment of  two  sovereign  masters,  pain  and  pleasure.  It  is  for 
them  alone  to  point  out  what  we  ought  to  do,  as  well  as  to  de- 
termine what  we  shall  do."^^  Morality  therefore  "the  object  of 
which  is  to  rear  the  fabric  of  felicity  by  the  hands  of  reason  and 
law"^^  has  as  its  foundation  the  principle  of  utility.  The  nature 
of  this  principle  is  most  definitely  stated.  "By  the  principle  is 
meant  that  principle  which  approves  or  disapproves  of  every 
action  whatsoever,  according  to  the  tendency  which  it  appears 
to  have  to  augment  or  diminish  the  happiness  of  the  party  whose 
interest  is  in  question."  The  position  which  Bentham  assumes 
is  that  the  phenomenon  which  we  designate  as  "moral  approval" 
is  the  operation  of  some  active  principle  of  selection  whereby 
man  acts  for  his  greatest  happiness,  the  manifestations  of  such 
a  principle  appearing  as  the  sensation  of  pleasure  and  pain. 

The  application  of  this  principle  of  utility  is  the  work  of  the 
legislator,  and  the  end  he  has  in  view  is  to  obtain  pleasure  and 
avoid  pains  for  mankind  in  general  or  the  State.  "Pains  and 
pleasures  are  the  instruments  he  has  to  work  with  ;"^^  it  behooves 

^^Bentham's  "Principles  of  Morals  and  Legislation,"  Clarendon  Press, 
p.  I. 

'\  c,  p.  2. 

'^Bentham's  "Theory  of  Morals  an:d  Legislation,"  p.  9. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF   UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


39 


him,  therefore,  to  understand  their  force,  which  is  again  in  other 
words,  their  value.  Thus  the  individual  regarded  by  Bentham^* 
as  a  rational  as  well  as  sentient  being  is  able  to  calculate  the 
values  of  pleasures  in  order  to  insure  the  greatest  possible  total 
by  considering  their  intensity,  duration,  certainty  or  uncertainty, 
propinquity  or  remoteness.  The  legislator,  moreover,  has  to  take 
into  consideration  the  further  circumstances  of  their  fecundity ; 
or  chance  of  being  followed  by  more  of  the  same  kind  of  pleas- 
ures ;  their  purity,  or  the  chance  of  their  being  followed  by  more 
of  the  opposite  kind  (or  pain)  ;  and  their  extent,  or  the  number 
of  persons  concerned.  In  other  words,  the  individual  or  legis- 
lator is  able  to  make  a  calculus  of  pleasure  (felicific  calculus)  in 
order  to  insure  the  greatest  total  happiness,  and  will  act  and 
legislate  with  this  end  in  view.  Thus,  man  described  as  a  natu- 
ralistic creature,  determined  in  his  actions  only  by  pleasurable 
sensations,  or  a  balance  of  pleasureable  over  painful  ones,  is  also 
regarded  as  rationally  calculating  a  total  of  pleasure,  and  pre- 
sumably determining  his  action  prudentially  by  giving  up  an  in- 
tense pleasure  of  short  duration,  for  a  moderate  pleasure  extend- 
ing over  a  long  span  of  time ;  or  an  uncertain  and  remote  pleasure 
for  a  certain  and  immediate  one  of  lesser  degree.  The  legisla- 
tor, for  apparently  no  motive  of  pleasure  at  all,  exercises  the 
same  rational  calculation  for  the  mass  of  the  people. 

From  whence  it  comes  that  motive  for  action  means  the  idea 
of  a  pleasure  or  pain  operating  in  some  inexplicable  way  directly 
upon  the  will."'^  No  motive  can  be  said  to  be  in  itself  bad,  as  the 
idea  of  a  bad  pleasure  is  a  contradiction  in  terms.  Motives,  as 
in  the  case  of  pleasures,  may  only  be  called  good  or  bad  with 
reference  to  their  known  effects  upon  the  sum  of  pleasures,  and 
then  not  accurately.  Disposition,  also,  which  is  the  sum  of  the 
motives  and  tendencies  of  action  in  an  individual,  may  not  rightly 
be  judged  good  or  bad  except  from  the  relative  amounts  of 
pleasure  and  pain  resulting  from  such  activity.     Thus  a  man  is 


'M.  c,  p.  30. 
"1.  c,  p.  lOI. 


40  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

said  to  have  a  "mischievous  disposition^*^  when  by  the  influence 
of  no  matter  what  motives,  he  is  presumed  to  be  more  apt  to 
engage  ...  in  acts  which  are  apparently  of  a  pernicious 
tendency,  than  in  such  as  are  apparently  of  a  beneficial  tendency." 
Immorality,  in  this  point  of  view,  amounts  to  an  error  of  judg- 
ment, or,  of  imagination  of  what  seems  to  be  pleasant.  Man  can 
act  only  from  an  idea  of  pleasure.  If  after  performing  the  ac- 
tion, painful  rather  than  pleasurable  sensations  ensue,  the  act 
is  deemed  "pernicious"  and  "immoral."  The  idea  of  pleasure, 
in  such  a  case,  was  mistaken. 

In  asserting,  however,  that  our  only  motive  to  action  is  an  idea 
of  pleasure,  Bentham  makes  this  position  extremely  explicit  by 
cataloging  human  pleasures  and  pains  under  the  title  of  "Table 
of  the  Springs  of  Actions ;  showing  the  various  species  of  pleas- 
ures and  pains  of  which  man's  nature  is  susceptible."^^  He 
enumerates  in  this  remarkable  tabulation  the  various  pleasures, 
including  pleasures  of  the  senses,  pleasures  of  wealth,  power, 
amity,  reputation,  sympathy  and  antipathy ;  the  pains  of  toil,  sick- 
ness, aversion,  etc.,  and  the  corresponding  motives  for  action 
arising  from  them.  It  is  noticeable  that  among  the  "Springs  of 
Action"  no  account  is  taken  of  activity  arising  from  the  prompt- 
ings of  conscience,  moral  considerations  or  disinterested  benevo- 
lence. This  omission  was  pointed  out  by  John  Stuart  Mill  in  his 
criticism  of  the  "Table  of  the  Springs  of  Actions"  but  the  omis- 
sion is  entirely  consistent  with  Bentham's  naturalistic  hypothesis. 
The  motives  of  fellow-feeling  toward  other  individuals,  of 
national  attachment  to  the  community  at  large,  and  of  good-will 
toward  mankind  find  their  place  in  the  "Table"  as  "interests  cor- 
responding to  the  pleasures  of  sympathy."  Under  the  same 
heading  are  lumped  all  the  extra-selfish  feelings  of  individual, 
familial,  national  or  human  good-will  as  "permanent  moral  qual- 
ities ;"  one  variety  of  the  ten  classes  of  the  "self-regarding  vir- 
tues."3« 

'"Bentham's  "Theory  of  Morals  and  Legislation,"  p.  132. 
^'Deontology  (Collected  Works),  I,  p.  195. 
'^Bentham's  Collected  Works,  I,  p.  200. 


THE   CONCEPT    OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


41 


But  though  the  pleasures  and  pains  enumerated  in  the  "Table 
of  the  Springs  of  Action"  are  seen  to  be  the  necessary  end  of  all 
activity,  and  are  regarded  in  the  character  of  "efficient  causes  or 
means''^"   in  the  theory  of  morals  and  legislation,  they  appear 
in  quite  a  different  aspect  in  the  theory  of  sanctions.    This  is  the 
keynote  to  Bentham's  whole  ethical  theory.     In  the  "Principles 
of  Morals  and  Legislation,"*"  he  says,  "There  are  four  distinguish- 
able sources  from  which  pleasures  and  pains  are  in  use  to  flow — 
physical,  political,  moral  and  religious.     Inasmuch  as  the  pleas- 
ures and  pains  belonging  to  each  of  them  are  capable  of  giving 
binding  force  to  any  law  of  conduct,  they  may  all  of  them  be 
termed  sanctions."    In  the  Deontology*^  Bentham  gives  five  sanc- 
tions: the  physical,  the  social  or  sympathetic,  the  moral  or  popu- 
lar, operating  through  public  opinion ;  the  political  or  legal,  and 
the  religious  or  superhuman.     The  concept  of  the  sanctions  pre- 
supposes the  temptation  to  act  contrary  to  self-interest,  or  to  do 
wrong;  and  consequently  the  binding  force  which  the  sanctions 
exert  is  manifest  in  the  pains  and  evils  which  are  incurred  in  dis- 
regarding them.    Thus  pain  results  from  disobeying  the  physical 
sanction,  and  loss  of  caste  from  failing  to  observe  the  moral  or 
popular  sanction.  The  political  or  legal  sanction  operates  through 
the   rewards   and   punishments   fixed   in   the  civil   and   criminal 
codes ;  the  religious  or  superhuman  sanctions  through  the  hopes 
of  heaven  and  fears  of  hell.     With  regard  to  the  dignity  of  hu- 
man nature,  this  account  of  the  inducements  urging  the  individ- 
ual to  act  for  his  own  interest  has  not  progressed  very  far  beyond 
Hobbes's  prudential  hedonism.     All  motive  is  read  in  terms  of 
self-interest;  and  the  sense  of  obligation  and  the  power  of  form- 
ing moral  judgments  is  denied  to  the  nature  of  man.     Though 
certain  extra-regarding  motives  are  admitted  in  the  "Table  of 
the  Springs  of  Action"  they  are  accounted  for  as  variations  of 
the  pleasures  of  sympathy.     If  Bentham's  psychological  founda- 
tions are  literally  interpreted  men  must  still  be  regarded  as  natu- 

■""Morals  and  Legislation."  p.  21. 

n.  c,  p.  24. 

"Bentham's  "Deontology,"  p.  103. 


42  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

ralistic  creatures,  who  would  be  mutually  destructive  if  allowed 
to  follow  their  natural  instincts,  but  who  are  coerced  to  act 
morally  by  a  system  conceived  as  external  and  imposed  by  some 
efficient  authority.  What  Bentham  really  does,  is  to  substitute 
the  legal  sanction  as  his  prop  to  morality,  (he  practically  ignores 
the  efficacy  of  the  other  sanctions),  which  enforced  its  dictates 
by  civil  and  criminal  rewards  and  punishments.  He  relies  on  the 
majesty  of  the  law  to  safeguard  failing  human  nature,  as  Paley 
relied  on  the  theological  sanction  manifest  through  the  will  of 
God. 

But  self-interest,  no  matter  how  "enlightened,"  was  not  an  end 
fitted  for  a  reform  platform.  Nor  could  utility  for  promoting 
self-interest  serve  as  an  ultimate  criterion  for  legislative  and 
legal  proceedings.  It  served  as  Bentham's  point  of  departure, 
but  we  find  another  principle  adopted  as  his  ultimate  moral  and 
legal  criterion.  This  is  the  "greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest 
number"  which  became  the  watchword  of  the  utilitarian  reform- 
ers. 

In  a  note  to  the  new  edition  of  the  "Principles  of  Morals  and 
Legislation,"  published  in  1828,  Bentham  states  that  "the  great- 
est happiness  principle  has  been  added  to  the  original  principle 
of  utility  as  the  source  of  happiness,  and  consequently  of  morals." 
He  defines  it  as  "that  principle  which  states  the  greatest  happi- 
ness of  all  those  whose  interest  is  in  the  question,  as  being  the 
right,  proper,  and,  only  right,  proper  and  universally  desirable 
end  of  human  action  ....  and  in  particular,  in  that  of  a 
functionary,  or  set  of  functionaries,  exercising  the  power  of 
Government."*-  The  reason  given  for  the  change  from  utility 
as  a  principle,  to  the  "greatest  happiness  principle"  is  that  the 
latter  applies  to  a  greater  number  of  people,  and  that  it  afifords  a 
"standard  of  right  and  wrong  by  which  alone  the  proprietary  of 
human  conduct  in  every  situation  can  with  propriety  be  tried." 

Utility  recognised  as  a  principle  making  for  some  form  of  well 
being  was  the  step  toward  defining  a  concrete  standard  of  moral 
judgments,  which  the  utilitarians  took  in  advance  of  the  earlier 

"Bentham's  Collected  Works,  I,  p.  i. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


43 


hedonists  and  the  rationalists.  But  utiHty  in  itself  is  vague.  We 
must  ask,  "utility  for  what?  for  my  happiness?  for  the  general 
well  being?  and  what  if  the  general  well  being  conflicts  with  my 
happiness?"  In  Bentham's  own  account  of  human  nature  these 
two  principles  may  clash,  for  he  admits  that  benevolence*^  is 
also  a  motive  in  conduct  as  well  as  the  attainment  of  pleasure. 
But  in  the  interests  of  practical  legislation  he  substituted  the 
"greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number"  for  this  shadowy 
"utility  for  the  Public  Good"  or  "effective  benevolence."  The 
logic  of  this  substitution  has  often  been  questioned,  and  rests  on  a 
form  of  the  well-known  logical  fallacy  of  composition.**  Every 
man  desires  his  own  greatest  happiness.  Every  man  attaining 
his  own  greatest  happiness  would  bring  about  the  greatest  hap- 
piness of  the  greatest  number.  Therefore,  every  man  desires 
the  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number.  In  other  words, 
a  principle,  that  of  utility,  defined  as  operating  in  a  purely  selfish 
being,  in  a  purely  selfish  way,  is  made  to  serve,  through  a  falla- 
cious argument,  as  an  altruistic  principle  whereby  the  individual 
is  moved  to  act  for  the  greatest  happiness,  not  of  himself,  but  of 
the  "greatest  number." 

Superficially  considered  Bentham  passed,  by  means  of  this 
fallacy,  from  the  individualistic  point  of  view  of  the  eighteenth 
century  tO'  the  organic  concept  of  society  of  the  nineteenth.  Man 
is  no  longer  conceived  as  an  isolated  unit  working  only  toward 
his  own  end,  but  as  inextricably  bound  by  his  various  social  re- 
lations, with  the  good  of  the  "greatest  number."  It  was  for 
John  Stuart  Mill  to  point  out  that  "greatest  number"  is  still  not 

"Bentham's  "Deontology,"  p.  140.  "Conduciveness  to  happiness  being 
then  the  test  of  virtue,  and  all  happiness  being  composed  of  our  own 
happiness  and  that  of  others,  the  production  of  our  own  happiness  is 
prudence,  the  production  of  the  happiness  of  others  is  effective  benevo- 
lence. The  tree  of  virtue  is  thus  divided  into  two  great  stems,  out  of 
which  grow  all  the  other  branches  of  virtue." 

"The  logic  of  the  "greatest  happiness  principle"  is  analysed  by  G.  K. 
Moore  in  his  "Principia  Ethica"  (Cambridge,  1903),  Chap.  T,  sections 
12-15;  and  in  Sidgwick's  "Methods  of  Ethics"  (Macmillan),  6th  edition, 
Bk.  I,  Chap.  ITT,  sections  2-3. 


44  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

the  "whole,"  and  that  though  consideration  for  the  majority  was 
an  advance  over  mere  consideration  for  the  individual,  still  such 
a  designation  was  not  just,  in  that  it  excluded  the  minority  from 
moral  consideration  on  the  part  of  the  community.  Bentham 
asserted  that  "every  man  counted  for  one,  and  no  man  for  more 
than  one"  in  the  public  will,  but  when  the  "greatest  number"  had 
been  determined,  the  lesser  numbers  not  only  ceased  to  "count 
for  one"  but  failed  to  count  at  all. 

But  practically  by  this  argument  Bentham  escaped  the  incon- 
venient consequences  of  the  naturalistic  position,  and  at  the  same 
time  proposed  a  practical  and  definite  standard,  to  which  all  plans 
for  reform  might  be  submitted.  Certain  laws  Bentham  saw  to  be 
wrong;  certain  conditions  in  society  are  wrong,  because  they  do 
not  make  for  the  "greatest  happiness  for  the  greatest  number." 
Certain  reforms,  laws,  ordinances,  and  innovations  are  right, 
because  they  tend  to  bring  about  the  greatest  happiness. 

To  sum  up  for  our  purpose  Bentham's  position  in  the  Utilitarian 
development,  in  order  to  estimate  the  extent  to  which  his  theory 
depends  on  a  naturalistic  interpretation  of  human  nature,  and  the 
degree  in  which  he  abandons  this  position,  it  is  necessary  to  point 
to  certain  obvious  features  of  his  theory,  and  perforce  to  ignore 
much  of  his  most  valuable  contribution  to  the  intellectual  develop- 
ment of  his  time.  First:  His  account  of  motivation  is  purely 
naturalistic.  Man  is  moved  to  act  by  his  ideas  of  pleasure  and 
pain ;  the  more  intense  determining  his  course.  What  is  pleasant 
is  good  and  what  is  painful  is  evil.  Therefore  with  pleasure- 
pain  as  the  source  of  moral  approval,  there  is  no  place  for  moral 
judgment,  within  the  sphere  of  human  nature.  Secondly :  Moral 
judgments,  and  moral  choices,  exist  and  are  necessary  to  insure 
the  end,  which  by  means  of  the  fallacy  of  composition  is  postulated 
for  the  individual ;  namely,  "the  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest 
number."  Certain  extra-selfish  motives  found  to  be  among  the 
springs  of  action,  and  to  make  for  the  greatest  happiness,  are 
nevertheless  at  the  mercy  of  the  stronger  and  more  numerous 
self-regarding  motives.  Therefore  to  safeguard  these  extra-self- 
ish motives  as  social  factors,  morality  is  enforced  by  the  legal 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


45 


sanction,  by  means  of  rewards  and  punishments.  So  far  Ben- 
tham  is  a  pure  hedonist,  chained  by  the  naturalistic  hypothesis 
to  a  selfish  interpretation  of  man,  and  to  an  external  and  conven- 
tional account  of  morality. 

But  being  by  nature  a  reformer,  and  by  profession  a  collector 
of  facts  and  a  maker  of  codes,  Bentham  did  not  adhere  too 
strictly  to  his  system.  He  catalogued  the  extra-selfish  motives  in 
his  ethical  theory  as  variations  of  the  pleasures  of  sympathy  and 
thus  naturalistic,  but  he  accounted  for  them  practically  in  such 
a  way  that  he  made  it  possible  for  the  last  great  utilitarian,  John 
Stuart  Mill,  to  adopt  the  Bentham  point  of  departure,  and  still 
to  free  utilitarian  ethics  from  its  old  hedonistic  and  naturalistic 
elements.  The  most  important  concept  of  a  non-naturalistic 
nature  which  Bentham  was  driven  to  adopt  is  the  concept  of  an 
ideal  end.  This  end  in  contradistinction  to  the  rationalistic  mode 
of  thought  has  a  concrete  content :  It  is  happiness  for  the  individ- 
ual, not  pleasure  in  the  sense  of  sensation.  But  as  the  individual  is 
a  nonentity  apart  from  his  social  relations,  it  is  the  happiness  of 
society.  In  the  case  of  conflicting  interests  society  is  determined 
numerically.  The  rule  of  the  majority  obtains,  or  the  "greatest 
happiness  of  the  greatest  number."  The  significant  point  is, 
that  having  stepped  with  questionable  logic  from  the  concept  of 
"greatest  happiness"  as  a  personal  end  to  greatest  happiness  as  a 
social  end,  Bentham  conceives  this  to  be  a  regulative  ideal,  which 
at  once  guides  the  conduct  of  a  moral  individual  and  outlines  a 
policy  for  the  legislator  in  formulating  the  laws  of  society.  This 
social  and  ideal  end  moreover  is  the  essential  feature  of  man's 
moral  nature.  It  is  not,  as  in  Paley's  system,  a  superhuman  or 
supernatural  design  revealed  to  human  beings  through  the  sensa- 
tion of  pleasure-pain. 

Furthermore,  with  an  end  in  view  any  action  or  law  may  be 
referred  to  the  single  principle  or  criterion  utility  for  judgment 
as  to  its  adequacy  as  means  to  the  end.  This  is  in  sharp  contra- 
distinction to  the  earlier  hedonistic  view  of  a  haphazard  "excess 
of  pleasure  over  pain"  as  determining  the  direction  of  activity. 
As  men  are  rational  as  well  as  sentient  beings,  they  estimate  the 


^6  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

relative  values  of  various  pleasures  in  a  calculus  of  pleasure  and 
pain.  The  concept  of  such  a  calculus  implies  that  there  is  pres- 
ent in  consciousness  numerous  desires  which  may  be  arranged 
in  a  scale,  according  to  their  intensity  and  duration.  The  rational 
individual  may  thus  calculate  the  result  of  any  course  of  action 
by  applying  the  criterion  of  utility  to  determine  which  of  several 
courses  of  action,  or  which  of  several  pleasures  will  satisfy  the 
most  intense  and  most  continuous  desires,  and  thus  attain  the 
greatest  total  happiness.  These  three  concepts,  that  of  a  regula- 
tive ideal  or  end,  or  a  criterion  or  standard  of  judgment,  and  of  a 
scale  of  desires  forming  a  total  of  all  desires,  are  concepts,  which 
though  true  of  actual  mental  and  moral  activity,  proceed  from 
some  hypothesis  other  than  the  naturalistic  psychology. 

The  definiteness  and  legal  exactness  of  Bentham's  mind,  and 
the  extreme  precision  of  his  method,  rendered  a  real  service  to 
the  ethical  thought  of  his  day.  The  theory  of  morals  was  strug- 
gling in  turbulent  waves  of  two  great  streams  of  thought,  ration- 
alism and  empiricism  were  meeting  and  amalgamating  to  the 
destruction  of  all  system.  Bentham  ticketed  human  attributes 
and  powers,  and  pigeon-holed  them  in  his  system  where  they 
might  be  immediately  found  when  wanted.  In  so  doing  he  made 
clear  the  utilitarian  position.  It  was  not  as  he  thought  it,  a  final, 
consistent,  ethical  theory,  but  a  transition  from  the  earlier 
abstract  external  aspect  of  human  nature  to  a  more  moral,  more 
profound  view  of  the  ideal  of  human  conduct  as  the  realisation 
of  personality.  The  fact  may  not  be  disregarded  that  though 
utilitarian  ethics  rested  on  an  inadequate  concept  of  human  nature, 
its  great  service  to  the  theory  of  morals  lay  in  the  fact  that  it 
again  connected  man  with  his  activities ;  it  recognised  that  the 
highest  human  qualities  were  exhibited  in  social  relations ;  it  gave 
a  content  to  the  concept  of  the  end  of  living,  and  a  definite  and 
practical  criterion  of  right  and  wrong  action. 

Bentham's  contribution  to  utilitarian  theory  was  his  method; 
his  service  to  the  progressive  party  of  the  day  lay  in  codifying  and 
tabulating  current  ideas  of  morality  and  putting  them  into  a 
concise  form  to  be  applied  practically.     His  immediate  usefulness 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


47 


unlike  that  of  the  other  utilitarians,  however,  was  confined  to 
his  study.  He  was  a  recluse  by  nature,  living  apart  from  men 
and  affairs,  and  was  temperamentally  unfitted  for  dealing  effec- 
tively with  practical  problems.  His  one  attempt  to  put  his 
schemes  into  practice  and  manage  a  "Panopticon"  or  model  prison 
was  a  complete  failure,  which  involved  him  in  serious  financial 
difficulties.  But  the  reform  phase  of  utilitarianism  cannot  be 
adequately  appreciated  without  some  mention  of  James  Mill, 
Bentham's  lieutenant  and  right  hand  man,  who  became  the 
practical  leader  of  that  small  but  effective  body  of  men  called 
the  "Utilitarians."  Bentham  was  the  "codifying  animal,"  John 
Stuart  Mill  a  theorist  and  a  dreamer,  but  James  Mill  was  a  leader 
of  men.  He  was  preeminently  a  teacher,  a  propagandist  and  a 
reformer.  He  breathed  controversy  and  revelled  in  antagonism. 
Though  he  added  nothing  new,  either  to  the  knowledge  or  the 
theory  of  his  times,  he  put  into  practice  the  principles  he  learned 
from  others,  and  imbued  all  his  immediate  associates,  and  an 
ever-widening  circle  of  disciples,  with  utilitarian  views,  by  his 
own  vigorous,  though  narrow  enunciation  of  Benthamite  doc- 
trines. 

The  utilitarians  were  ever  a  small  and  most  unpopular  minority, 
but  the  elder  Mill  managed  to  keep  their  views  and  their  demands 
for  reform  before  the  eyes  of  the  British  public  by  his  incessant 
personal  energy  in  teaching,  writing  and  public  speaking. 

In  the  younger  Mill's  Autobiography,  we  get  a  vivid  picture 
of  this  tireless,  irritable  and  decisive  personality.  He  was  edu- 
cated in  Scotland  for  the  Church,  but  in  the  course  of  his  studies 
found  that  he  could  not  believe  the  doctrines  of  any  creed.  He 
gave  up  the  idea  of  the  ministry,  came  to  England,  and  took  up 
journalism.  Here  he  became  the  intimate  associate  of  Bentham, 
Ricardo,  Malthus,  Hume  and  Grote,  and  threw  the  whole  energy 
of  his  nature  into  propagating  utilitarian  doctrines.  "His  moral 
convictions,"  to  quote  his  son's  autobiography,  "were  very  much 
the  character  of  the  Greek  philosophers,  and  were  delivered  with 
the  force  and  decision  which  characterised  all  that  came  from 
him.     Tn    liis    personal    qualities    the    Stoic    predominated.     His 


48      '  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

standard  of  morals  was  Epicurean,  in  as  much  as  it  was  utilitarian, 
taking  as  the  exclusive  test  of  right  and  wrong  the  tendency  of 
actions  to  produce  pleasure  and  pain;  but  he  had  (and  this  was 
the  Cynic  element)  scarcely  any  belief  in  pleasures  .... 
he  was  not  insensible  to  pleasure,  but  declared  very  few  of  them 
worth  the  price,  which  at  least  in  the  present  state  of  society  must 
be  paid  for  them.  He  thought  human  life  a  poor  thing  at  best 
after  the  freshness  of  youth  and  unsatisfied  curiosity  had  gone  by 
.  .  .  .  He  would  sometimes  say  that  if  life  were  made  what 
it  might  be,  by  good  government  and  good  education,  it  would  be 
worth  living,  but  he  never  spoke  with  anything  like  enthusiasm 
even  of  that  possibility."*^ 

This  curious  contradiction  in  his  nature  is  evident  in  his 
writings,  and  in  all  his  participations  in  public  affairs.  The 
Epicurean  pleasure-pain  philosophy  was  conjoined  to  a  rigid 
Stoical  sense  of  duty  and  self-sacrifice  for  the  public  good.  He 
championed  the  greatest  happiness  principle,  and  was  ruthless  in 
tearing  down  the  public's  cherished  ideals  and  prejudices,  espe- 
cially in  regard  to  religious  questions.  His  peculiar  personal  bias 
has  been  underestimated  in  its  effect  on  the  popular  attitude  to- 
ward utilitarianism.  James  Mill  stood  out  among  all  his  associates 
as  the  practical  exponent  of  Benthamism.  His  interpretation  of 
Bentham's  ethical  position  brought  forth  Carlyle's  rhodomantades 
against  that  form  of  morality;  and  his  interpretation  of  Political 
Economy  earned  for  it  the  name  of  the  "dismal  science." 
Nevertheless  it  was  through  his  tireless  spirit,  and  his  incessant 
propaganda  that  utilitarian  theory  became  part  of  the  very  fabric 
of  English  political,  ethical  and  economic  thought.  The  small 
body  of  utilitarians  played  an  important  part  in  the  agitations  for 
reform  which  culminated  in  the  Reform  Bill  of  1832,  in  the  Aboli- 
tion of  the  Slave  Trade  in  1833,  in  the  legal  reforms,  carried  out 
under  Bentham's  personal  supervision,  and  in  the  questions  of 
Church  and  ecclesiastical  reform. 

In  his  ethical  position  James  Mill  is  an  unquestioning  pupil  of 
Bentham,  whom  he  ever  regarded  as  his  master  and  teacher; 

*'John  Stuart  Mill,  "Autobiography,"  p.  46. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


49 


but  his  Benthamism  is  very  rigidly  interpreted.  Pleasure-pain 
is  the  motive  of  all  action ;  utility  is  not  only  the  criterion  of 
morals,  but  is  morality  itself,  to  the  exclusion  of  any  moral  sense, 
or  moral  faculty  of  judgment.  He  follows  Bentham's  account 
of  motivation,  and  is  even  more  explicit  than  his  master  in  his 
delineation  of  human  disposition,  which  he  describes  as  a  col- 
lection of  desires  and  aversions  coming  from  pleasant  and  painful 
sensations,  which  by  the  process  of  association  cause  muscular 
contractions,  and  thus  bodily  action.  He  agrees  with  Hartley  that 
free-will  is  superfluous  in  a  human  machine  working  by  the  laws 
of  association.  In  a  being  so  constituted,  independent  moral 
action  is  impossible,  hence  Mill  lays  great  stress  on  force  of  the 
external  sanctions,  especially  the  legal  sanction,  to  enforce  the 
"greatest  happiness  principle."  It  is  consistent  with  the  con- 
tradiction in  his  own  character  that  in  insisting  on  the  coercion 
of  the  legal  sanction  he  denied  to  human  nature  any  genuine 
interest  in  the  public  welfare,  for  which  he  laboured  and  sacri- 
ficed all  his  life.  He  reconciles  the  ideal  of  unselfishness  and 
devotion  to  duty,  with  the  self-interest  psychology  by  Bentham's 
arguments  for  the  rational  calculation  of  pleasure-pain.  Man's 
rational  faculties,  abstracted  from  his  sentient  (though  domi- 
nant) nature  foresees  and  calculates  a  greater  total  happiness 
than  may  be  obtained  by  indulging  the  unreflecting  impulses  of 
self-interest. 

In  both  Mill's  principal  works,  the  "Analysis"  and  the  "Frag- 
ment on  Mackintosh,"  the  weakness  of  the  utilitarian  theory  of 
morals  becomes  most  apparent.  The  impossible  psychological 
analysis  of  man  as  a  collection  of  antagonistic  principles,  formally 
held  together  by  association,  is  evident,  when  the  same  human 
being  is  assumed  to  act  unselfishly  and  from  an  exalted  sense  of 
duty.  Morality,  on  the  other  hand,  described  as  an  external  ar- 
tifice, foisted  on  man  by  means  of  the  legal  sanction,  in  practical 
life  becomes  an  ideal  of  duty,  according  to  which  the  individual 
end  is  merged  in  the  "greatest  happiness  to  the  greatest  number." 

James  Mill's  real  significance  for  the  development  of  English 
ethical   theory,   lies,  however,   in   his   personal    influence   on   the 


50  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT, 

intellectual  and  spiritual  nature  of  his  eldest  son.  John  Stuart 
Mill  was  the  type  of  mind  infinitely  suggestive  when  coming  at 
the  turning  point  of  an  intellectual  and  moral  development.  He 
was  an  avowed  utilitarian  to  the  end  of  his  life,  adhering  to  the 
principles  laid  down  by  Bentham  and  championed  by  his  father. 
But  his  natural  instinct  for  truth  led  him  to  a  deeper  insight 
into  the  moral  nature  of  man  than  was  compatible  with  the 
theories  he  rightfully  inherited.  It  is  through  his  work  that 
English  ethical  theory  emerged  from  the  artificial,  shallow, 
though  practically  efificient  phase,  which  we  have  briefly  indi- 
cated. He  is  the  link  in  the  chain  between  the  old  form  and  the 
new  spirit.  Utilitarianism,  pre-eminently  the  science  of  conduct 
for  practical  advantages,  he  perceived  to  be  inadequate  as  an 
explanation  of  what  he  recognised  as  highest  in  human  nature. 
In  seeking  to  find  the  ground  for  the  apparently  ideal  nature  of 
certain  human  attributes  he  passed,  and  with  him  English  ethical 
theory,  from  the  old  naturalistic  and  mechanical  view  of  human 
nature,  to  an  ideal,  organic  and  essentially  moral  philosophy  of 
conduct.  His  work  has  suffered  the  attacks  which  modern  ethical 
scholars  have  made  on  the  whole  pleasure-pain  philosophy  of 
morals,  and  critics  have  demolished  much  of  his  constructive 
■work,  but  it  was  John  Stuart  Mill  who  stimulated  the  best  of 
modern  ethical  thinkers  and  himself  pointed  out  the  way  to  the 
work  they  have  accomplished. 

In  the  "Autobiography"  he  gives  an  account  of  his  strange 
childhood,  apart  from  other  children  of  his  own  age,  and  of  his 
strenuous  education  carried  on  under  the  personal  supervision 
of  his  father,  which  was  supplemented  by  teaching  what  he 
learned  to  his  younger  brothers  and  sisters,  and  by  taking 
long  walks  with  his  father  during  which  he  delivered  carefully 
prepared  discourses  upon  topics  taken  from  his  reading.  At 
fourteen,  he  spent  a  year  in  France  with  Sir  Samuel  Bentham 
and  his  family,  the  brother  of  his  father's  patron  and  master, 
where  he  "breathed  for  a  whole  year  the  free  and  genial  atmos- 
phere of  Continental  life"*"  and  gained  his  life-long  interest  in 

'-1.  c,  p.  58. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


51 


French  political  ideas.  On  his  return  he  took  up  his  intellectual 
work  with  his  father,  and  was  initiated  into  all  phases  of  utili- 
tarianism. He  became  in  time  an  ardent  student  and  disciple  of 
Bentham,  and  the  most  eminent  exponent  of  his  doctrines.  At 
the  age  of  sixteen  he  began  to  write  for  the  press,  and  organised 
a  debating  club  in  which  all  the  younger  members  of  the  party 
were  affiliated,  many  of  whom  later  became  prominent  politically 
as  the  utilitarian  Radicals.  His  whole  energy  was  turned,  as 
was  his  father's,  to  propagating  that  philosophical  creed  which 
to  his  sensitive  and  enthusiastic  temperament  partook  of  the 
nature  of  a  religion. 

But  the  turning-point  in  his  career,  and  a  significant  date  in 
the  history  of  English  ethics,  came  when  he  was  about  twenty 
years  old.  Mill^^  had  been  studying,  writing  and  propagating 
utilitarian  doctrines  incessantly,  when  in  the  autumn  of  1826  he 
found  himself  in  a  "dull  state  of  nerves,  when  pleasures  became 
insipid  and  indifferent."  In  this  state  of  mind,  he  put  the  ques- 
tion directly  to  himself,  "Suppose  that  all  your  objects  in  life 
were  realised,  and  that  the  changes  in  institutions  and  opinions 
which  you  are  looking  forward  to  could  be  completely  effected 
at  this  very  instant,  would  this  be  a  joy  and  happiness  to  you?" 
And  an  irresponsible  self-consciousness  distinctly  answered  "No." 
At  this  he  adds,  "The  whole  foundation  on  which  my  life  was 
constructed  fell  down."  His  traditional  code,  his  father's  life- 
work,  the  greatest  happiness  principle,  the  foundations  of  his 
universe  crumbled  before  this  one  searching  question.  If  the 
institutions  which  constituted  his  whole  moral  world  should  sud- 
denly become  perfected,  they  would  find  him  still  miserable.  The 
systems,  codes  and  reforms  which  he  and  his  fellow-utilitarians 
had  ardently  planned  had  no  solace  for  the  individual.  It  was 
all  external,  cold  and  passionless,  and  to  be  labeled  "greatest 
happiness"  was  a  bitter  satire. 

From  this  mental  crisis,  however,  Mill  revived  with  the  new 
knowledge  that  the  passive  sensibilities  needed  to  be  cultivated 
as  well  as  the  active  capacities,  and  require  to  be  nourished  and 

"Mill,  "Autobiography,"  p.  145. 


52  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

enriched  as  well  as  guided.  He  discovered  that  he  had  a  soul 
as  well  as  a  mind.  The  method  of  his  recovery  opened  up  new 
fields  of  interest  in  poetry  and  imagination.  In  consequence  of 
an  awakened  aesthetic  appreciation,  he  formed  the  closest  friend- 
ship of  his  life — save  one,  with  Sterling,  a  "lover  of  poetry  and 
the  fine  arts,"  **^  whom  he  describes  in  glowing  terms  as  the 
most  lovable  of  men.  Sterling  confessed  to  him,  after  their 
intimacy  had  ripened  through  their  mutual  interest  in  poetry, 
that  he  and  others  had  always  thought  Mill  a  "machine-made 
man,"  until  they  discovered  "that  Wordsworth  and  all  the  name 
implied,"  belonged  to  him  as  well  as  to  Sterling  and  his  friends. 

The  significant  point  in  this  bit  of  personal  history  is,  that 
until  Mill  had  passed  through  this  experience,  he  was  a  "machine- 
made  man,"  manufactured  by  his  father  on  a  Benthamite  model 
to  be  a  sort  of  thinking,  propaganding  automat ;  a  "collection" 
of  facts  and  theories  "associated"  together  on  a  utilitarian  prin- 
ciple. After  Mill  had  lived  through  this  humanising  experience, 
which  he  calls  "One  Step  Onward,"  in  his  autobiography,  his 
insight  into  life  was  sharpened,  and  the  character  of  his  ethical 
speculation  takes  on  a  new  phase.  His  divergence  from  Ben- 
thamism is  coincident  with  an  aroused  interest  in  German  meta- 
physics and  with  a  widespread  study  of  the  post-Kantian  idealists. 
The  trend  of  ethical  thinking  after  Mill  is  strongly  idealistic 
in  character  and  it  would  be  hard  to  determine  with  any  pre- 
cision the  extent  of  his  influence  in  the  following  decades.  His 
own  contribution  to  the  theory  of  morals  is  in  no  sense  final, 
but  it  bridged  the  gulf  from  the  old  era,  and  laid  the  way  for 
the  new. 

This  study  does  not  admit  of  a  detailed  examination  of  Mill's 
later  works.  It  is  enough  for  our  purpose  to  indicate  three 
essays  that  give  his  general  position.  The  first  is  the  essay  on 
"Utilitarianism,"  an  attempt  made  in  1862  to  restate  Bentham's 
ethical  doctrines,  with  the  result  of  showing  how  far  Mill  him- 
self had  diverged  from  them.  But  though  in  reality  Mill  de- 
parted   far    from   the   original   utilitarian   point   of   view   in   his 

''1.  c,  pp.  150-154. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS. 


53 


various  interpretations  of  the  greatest  happiness  principle,  he 
remained  to  the  end  of  his  life  a  loyal  supporter  of  the  doctrine 
and  ever  claimed  to  be  a  "utilitarian." 

In  his  chapter  on  "What  Utilitarianism  Is,"  he  indicates  very 
clearly  the  character  of  the  "greatest  happiness  principle"  and 
in  its  elucidation  points  out  with  equal  clearness  many  things 
which  it  is  not.  "The  end  which  accepts  as  the  foundation  of 
morals  utility,  or  the  greatest  happiness  principle,  holds  that  all 
actions  are  right  as  they  tend  to  promote  happiness,  wrong  as 
they  tend  to  produce  the  reverse  of  happiness.  By  happiness  is 
intended  pleasure,  and  the  absence  of  pain ;  by  unhappiness  pain, 
and  the  privation  of  pleasure  .  .  .  the  theory  of  life  on 
which  this  theory  of  morality  is  grounded  .  .  .  (is)  namely, 
that  pleasure  and  freedom  from  pain,  are  the  only  things  desir- 
able as  ends."*®  This  is  the  "machine-made"  Mill  giving  expres- 
sion to  his  inherited  doctrines.  Bentham  himself  could  not  have 
exceeded  this  statement  for  definiteness. 

But  in  elaborating  this  view  of  morality,  the  real  Mill  appears, 
and  expounds  a  far  different  theory  of  conduct  from  the  natural- 
istic pleasure-pain  account.  In  replying  tO'  Carlyle's  charge  that 
such  a  principle  is  a  "doctrine  worthy  of  swine,"  he  asserts  that 
it  is  "quite  compatible  with  the  principle  of  utility  to  recognise 
the  fact  that  some  kinds  of  pleasures  are  more  desirable  and 
more  valuable  than  others. "°°  Pleasures,  therefore,  may  be 
ranged  in  a  scale  and  admit  of  being  judged  as  higher  or  lower, 
not  merely  as  more  or  less  intense,  as  Bentham  asserted.  More- 
over, there  is  a  corresponding  range  of  faculties  in  the  individual 
which  are  susceptible  to  the  various  qualities  of  pleasure.  "A 
being  of  higher  faculties  requires  more  to  make  him  happy,  is 
capable  probably  of  more  acute  suffering,  and  is  certainly  acces- 
sible to  it  at  more  points  than  one  of  an  inferior  type ;  but  in 
spite  of  these  liabilities,  he  can  never  really  wish  to  sink  into 
what  he  feels  to  be  a  lower  grade  of  existence.""^ 

"Mill,  "Utilitarianism,"  p.  9.     Longmans,  Green  &  Co.,  4th  edition,  1901. 
■"1.  c,  pp.  10- 1 1. 
"1.  c,  p.    13. 


54  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

The  qualities  of  higher  and  lower  in  the  scale  of  pleasures 
are  thus  transferred  to  the  nature  of  the  agent,  who  presumably 
judges  pleasures  from  some  subjective  standard,  and  rejects 
those  which  fall  below  this  criterion,  holding,  that  "it  is  better 
to  be  a  human  being  dissatisfied,  than  a  pig  satisfied ;  better  to 
be  Socrates  dissatisfied  than  a  fool  satisfied."  It  is  in  such  state- 
ments as  these,  and  there  are  many  in  the  "Utilitarianism,"  that 
Mill  shows  that  he  has  taken  a  decisive  step  away  from  the  Ben- 
thamite position.  In  judging  action,  the  human  being  recognises 
a  certain  inherent  value  in  his  personality,  and  he  will  reject 
pleasures,  and  put  away  happiness,  if  he  considers  it  of  a  qual- 
ity degrading  to  his  nature.  The  emphasis  is  no  longer  on  "feel- 
ing," "sensation,"  man's  effective  nature,  but  on  the  desires 
which  impel  man  to  act,  and  the  nature  of  those  desires,  whether 
of  a  "higher"  or  "lower"  character,  tending  to  express  a  "better" 
or  "worse"  personality.  In  these  cases  the  greatest  happiness 
principle  is  definitely  set  aside,  the  acquisition  of  pleasure  is 
rejected  as  the  sole  motive  for  action,  on  a  view  of  the  moral 
life  as  a  development  of  personality.  Adhering  logically  to  the 
utilitarian  hypothesis,  the  man  who  rejects  a  great  and  intense 
pleasure  as  being  of  a  character  unworthy  of  his  nature,  commits 
an  action  contrary  to  the  greatest  happiness  principle,  and  so 
immoral. 

Recognising  that  it  is  conceivable  for  the  individual  to  reject 
a  possible  pleasure  from  moral  considerations,  Mill  takes  another 
long  step  away  from  his  original  hypothesis,  and  asserts  that 
unquestionably  it  is  possible  to  do  ivithout  happiness ;  "it  is  done 
involuntarily  by  nineteen-twentieths  of  mankind,  even  in  those 
parts  of  our  present  world  which  are  least  deep  in  barbarism, 
and  it  is  often  done  voluntarily  by  the  hero  and  the  martyr  for 
the  sake  of  something  which  he  prizes  more  than  his  individual 
happiness."^^  This  amounts  to  saying  that  since  the  acquisition 
of  happiness  is  the  end  of  life  and  the  whole  content  of  morality, 
nineteen-twentieths  of  mankind  involuntarily,  and  the  hero  and 
martyr  voluntarily,  have  no  object  in  living,  and  are  outside  the 


02 


Mill,  "Utilitarianism,"  p.  22. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF   UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS.  55 

pale  of  morality.  This  is  a  hard  saying,  even  for  the  son  of 
James  Mill. 

But  whether  the  moral  end  be  regarded  as  the  crude  pleasure 
of  the  earlier  utilitarianism,  or  as  a  sense  of  dignity  and  worth, 
as  implied  in  the  sections  quoted,  Mill,  nevertheless,  sometimes 
lapses  to  his  former  point  of  view  in  regarding  morality  as  an 
external  system.  It  is  a  body  of  rules  of  conduct  imposed  upon 
the  individual  from  without. ^^  There  must  be  some  force  com- 
pelling obedience ;  it  must  have  some  sanction.  In  recasting 
Bentham's  account  of  the  sanctions  to  morality,  Mill  followed 
the  traditional  code  to  the  extent  of  finding  two  sanctions  to  be 
external.  The  religious  sanction  upholds  morality  by  means  of 
the  hopes  and  fears  of  eternal  bliss  or  misery ;  the  legal  sanction 
operates  through  the  officers  of  the  law  by  means  of  rewards  and 
punishments.  But  more  fundamental  for  Mill  is  the  internal,  or 
altruistic  sanction,  "a  feeling  in  our  mind,  a  pain  more  or  less 
intense,  attendant  on  violation  of  duty,  which  in  properly  cul- 
tivated moral  natures  rises,  in  more  serious  cases,  into  shrinking 
from  it  as  an  impossibility.  This  feeling  when  disinterested,  and 
connecting  itself  with  the  pure  idea  of  Duty,  is  the  essence  of 
Conscience."  But  despite  the  precision  of  this  anti-utilitarian 
account  of  the  moral  standard,  as  grounded  in  the  "conscientious 
feelings  of  mankind,"^*  Mill  refuses  to  regard  this  as  man's 
essential  nature,  but  describes  it  as  "acquired,"  an  "artificial  crea- 
tion"^^  held  together  by  "moral  associations,"  but,  however, 
"natural"  in  the  sense  that  there  is  a  "basis  of  sentiment  for 
utilitarian  morality"^*'  in  "the  social  feelings  of  mankind." 

The  secret  of  the  confusions  and  contradictions  which  charac- 
terise the  essay  on  "Utilitarianism"  lies  in  the  fact  that  two  defi- 
nite but  antithetical  interpretations  are  present  in  it.  The  main 
positions  are  clear,  the  minor  threads  of  argument  are  hopelessly 
interwoven.    The  old  "machine-made"  fabric  of  Paley  and  Ben- 

»'Mill,  "Utilitarianism,"  p.  41. 
"1.  c,  p.  42. 
"1.  c,  p.  45. 
^-l.  c,  p.  46. 


5 6  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

tham,  is  being  patched  and  relined  with  cloth  of  another  pattern. 
The  former  concept  of  the  end  of  Hfe  as  a  sum  of  pleasure  is 
replaced  by  Mill  by  a  more  profound  concept  of  the  aim  of  living 
as  the  development  of  personality.  The  psychological  account 
of  man  as  a  collection  of  natural  passions  and  rational  faculties 
bound  together  by  laws  of  habit  and  association  gradually  gives 
place  to  the  view  of  human  nature  as  an  organic  unity,  express- 
ing itself  in  action  as  will,  in  thought  as  intellect  and  under- 
standing, in  creative  forms  as  the  expression  of  the  aesthetic 
ideal,  but  essentially  one  and  directed  to  the  accomplishment  of 
its  own  highest  development  in  accordance  with  an  ideal  of  per- 
sonality, gradually  becoming  self-conscious  in  the  process  of 
living.^^  The  nature  of  morality,  also,  suffers  a  dual  interpreta- 
tion. Formerly  regarded  as  an  external  convention  and  artifice, 
framed  by  selfish  beings  to  serve  selfish  ends ;  and  yet  in  some 
inexplicable  manner,  composed  of  extra-selfish  principles,  it  is 
now  conceived  as  the  expression  of  the  "conscientious  feelings 
of  mankind."  Mill  with  all  his  insight  never  penetrated  into  the 
real  utilitarian  difficulty.  He  never  connects  the  individual  with 
society  except  by  some  "process  of  association."  This  is  the 
remnant  of  the  Hobbesian  point  of  view,  expressed  in  Bentham's 
famous  dictum,  "Every  man  to  count  for  one,  and  no  one  for 
more  than  one."  Within  the  individual  are  motions,  springs  of 
action,  principles,  etc.,  all  considered  as  separate,  independent, 
and  uniform  only  by  habit  and  association.  Conversely,  all 
exterior  to  the  individual,  other  men  and  institutions  roughly 
summed  up  under  such  terms  as  "society,"  "government"  or 
"morality,"  are  considered  as  external,  and  as  coercing  man  by 
compulsory  sanctions.  The  concept  of  human  nature  as  an 
organic  unity,  and  in  turn  as  organically  related  to  society  as  parts 
within  a  whole,  is  made  explicit  in  English  ethical  theory  after 
the  work  of  John  Stuart  Mill,  but  this  point  of  view  is  only 
implied  in  Mill's  own  writings. 

But  the  source  of  the  most  persistent  contradiction  in  the 
"Utilitarianism,"  is  the  confusion  which  Mill  shares  with  every 

"1.  c,  p.  9. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY   IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS.  57 

Other  utilitarian  writer,  as  to  the  nature  of  happiness,  pleasure 
and  satisfaction.     These  three  terms  are  often  defined  in  utili- 
tarian literature  and  their  essential  differences  are  recognised, 
but  they  are  universally  substituted  for  one  another  in  the  course 
of  argument,  with  the  result  that  the  words  have  lost  their  purity 
of  meaning,  and  sharpness  of  denotation.     In  accordance  with 
an  idealistic  self-realisation  view  of  ethics  the  distinction  between 
the  concepts  seem  to  be  as  follows :  pleasure  is  a  state  of  feeling 
accompanying  certain  experiences  and  the  attainment  of  objects  of 
desire,  irrespective  of  the  nature  of  the  desire,  whether  fleeting  or 
permanent,  intense  or  casual.     Satisfaction  and  happiness,  how- 
ever, have  to  do  with  the  ultimate  end  or  the  ideal  of  personality, 
which  any  action  tends  to  realise.    When  a  desire  is  attained,  and 
it  is  seen  to  be  in  accordance  with  our  view  of  the  type  of  person 
we  wish  to  be,  satisfaction  and  pleasure  is  experienced.  When  upon 
reflection  our  attained  desire  is  seen  not  to  be  in  harmony  with  our 
wider  standard  of  worth,  pleasure  may  still  be  experienced,  but 
not  satisfaction.     When  in  the  long  run,  our  activities  tend  to 
accomplish  the  end  we  have  in  view,  and  we  are  in  the  process 
of  realising  our  ideal  of  conduct,  that  condition  is  happiness,  or 
harmony  of  means  with  the  end.     Such  a  condition  may  or  may 
not  be  pleasant,  according  to  circumstances,  but  it  will  be  satis- 
factory.   We  are  denominated  as  "happy"  only  in  the  accomplish- 
ment of  what  we  fundamentally  desire.     Thus  satisfaction  and 
happiness  may  no  more  be  termed  the  end  of  life  than  pleasure. 
As  the  latter  is  the  emotional  colour  indicating  the  attainment  of 
any  desired  object,   the   former   are  also  circumstances   in   the 
attainment  of  the  ultimate  end,  which  is  a  state  of  doing,  not  a 
state  of  being  and  the  realisation  of  an  ideal  of  self  as  a  devel- 
oped personality. 

The  presence  of  those  various  antithetical  points  of  view  are 
most  evident  in  the  last  chapter  of  the  "Utilitarianism"  on  the 
"Relation  between  Justice  and  Utility."  "One  of  the  strongest 
obstacles  to  the  reception  of  the  doctrine  that  utility  or  happiness 
is  the  criterion  of  right  and  wrong,  has  been  drawn  from  the  idea 
of  Justice."58     Mill   shows  that  the  powerful   sentiment   which 

''Mill,  "Utilitarianism,"  p.  62. 


eg  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

has  been  attached  to  the  idea  of  justice  is  due  to  the  underlying 
utilitarian  reasons  which  have  been  "associated  with  it,"^^  to- 
gether with  the  natural  instincts  of  self-defence  and  sympathy. 
It  is  an  example  of  one  of  Mill's  "Collections"  held  together  by 
laws  of  association.  But  in  arriving  at  this  conclusion  he  analyses 
the  idea  of  justice,  which  he  finds  to  be  the  same  thing  as  the  pre- 
servation of  rights.  These  rights  are  "something  which  society 
ought  to  defend  one  in  the  possession  of.'"^*^  They  are  (i)  Rights 
to  personal  liberty;  (2)  Rights  to  Property  or  what  ought  to 
belong  to  a  person;  (3)  Rights  to  Justice  before  the  law;  (4)  to 
the  fulfilment  of  Contract;  (5)  to  impartiality,  and  (6)  to  equal 
opportunity.^^  This  analysis  of  justice  and  rights  diflfers  in  no 
way  from  moral  obligation  in  general,  except  that  it  is  directly 
connected  with  the  idea  of  penal  sanction,  "which  is  the  essence 
of  law,  and  enters  not  only  into  the  conception  of  injustice,  but 
into  that  of  every  kind  of  wrong."**-  Justice  is  then,  that  part  of 
morality  which  the  penal  sanction  enforces.  It  is  what  "some 
individual  person  can  claim  from  us  as  his  moral  right. "^^ 

The  feeling,  however,  which  accompanies  the  idea  of  justice 
though  made  up  of  "natural  impulses"  and  principles  of  expediency 
backed  by  the  legal  sanction  stands  for  "certain  moral  require- 
ments, which,  regarded  collectively,  stand  higher  in  the  scale  of 
social  utility,  and  are  therefore  of  more  paramount  obligation 
than  any  others.""*  In  other  words,  the  rights  which  Mill  finds 
enforced  by  the  legal  sanction,  and  which  make  up  our  idea  of 
justice,  are  in  reality  the  conditions  which  a  person  has  a  right 
to  demand  in  virtue  of  his  being  a  person.  Justice  is  thus  seen 
not  to  be  "associated"  with  morality,  but  to  be  the  condition  of 
morality. 


6.1 

c, 

p- 

62. 

~1. 

c. 

p. 

88. 

"1. 

c, 

p- 

80, 

«J 

c, 

p- 

72. 

631 

c, 

p- 

75. 

"1. 

c, 

p- 

76. 

THE  CONCEPT  OF   UTILITY   IN    ENGLISH   ETHICS. 


59 


This  concept  of  Justice  implicitly  stated  in  the  "Utilitarianism" 
was,  however,  the  point  of  departure  of  the  "Essay  on  Liberty 
(1885).  The  greatest  happiness  principle  as  the  criterion  of 
morality  is  frankly  abandoned  in  this  plea  for  the  rights  of  the 
minority.  As  we  have  pointed  out  before,  the  principle  of  the 
greatest  happiness  to  the  greatest  number  logically  applied  would 
exclude  the  minority  from  moral  consideration  or  from  the  sym- 
pathy which  Bentham  uneasily  recognised  as  a  human  attribute. 
This  "sentiment  of  sympathy"  forced  the  earlier  Utilitarians 
to  recognise  the  rights  of  the  minority  in  admitting  that  "every 
man  should  count  as  one  and  no  man  as  more  than  one"  before 
the  principle  of  greatest  happiness  is  applied.  After  its  applica- 
tion, the  minority  disappears  from  moral  consideration.  John 
Stuart  Mill's  appeal  for  the  protection  of  the  minority  from  the 
tyranny  of  the  majority  is  not  based  on  the  "greatest  happiness 
principle"  but  on  "Utility  in  the  largest  sense,  grounded  on  the 
permanent  interests  of  mankind  as  a  progressive  being."^^  The 
object  of  the  essay  is  to  assert  the  principle  that  "the  sole  end 
for  which  mankind  is  warranted,  individually  or  collectively,  in 
interfering  with  the  liberty  of  action  of  any  of  their  numbers  is 
self-protection."^*'  Liberty  is  not  championed  to  promote  "pleas- 
ure," or  the  "greatest  happiness,"  but  as  the  condition  of  man's 
individuality,  "the  highest  and  most  harmonious  development  of 
his  powers  to  a  complete  and  consistent  whole."  Liberty  of 
thought  and  expression  as  the  condition  of  the  development  of  the 
individual  are  the  rights  of  man,  not  because  such  rights  are 
arbitrarily  sanctioned  to  insure  "happiness"  but  in  virtue  of 
man's  ideal  of  worth,  as  being  the  conditions  of  the  free  develop- 
ment of  personality.  "Among  the  works  of  man,  which  human 
life  is  rightly  employed  in  perfecting  and  beautifying,  the  first  in 
importance  surely  is  man  himself."®^ 

Moreover  liberty  is  not  only  the  condition  of  the  individual's 
development,  but  it  is  the  condition  of  the  well-being  of  society. 

"J.  S.  Mill,  "Essay  on  Liberty,"  p.  6.    Longmans,  Green  &  Co.,  1889. 
"Mill,  "Essay  on  Liberty,"  p.  33. 
"1.  c.  p.  34- 


6o  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

In  the  Essay  on  the  "Subjection  of  Women,"  the  principle  on 
which  is  based  the  whole  argument  of  this  first  famous  plea  for 
Woman's  Rights,  is  not  the  "greatest  happiness  for  women,"  but 
"the  claims  of  human  beings  as  such"*'^  for  equality  as  the  condi- 
tion of  their  greatest  development.  This  original  argument  for 
the  equality  of  the  sexes  does  not  even  exhibit  the  terminology 
of  Mill's  inherited  doctrine.  Liberty  and  equality  are  urged  for 
the  "nerve  and  spring  which  it  presents  to  the  intellect  and  feel- 
ings, the  more  useful  public  spirit,  and  calmer  and  broader  sense 
of  duty  that  it  engenders,  and  the  generally  loftier  platform  on 
which  it  elevates  the  individual  as  a  moral,  spiritual,  and  social 
being."«» 

Mill's  position  in  English  ethical  development  may  briefly  be 
summed  up  by  noting  that,  though  he  consciously  postulated  the 
"machine-made"  utilitarianism  of  the  Benthamite  period  as  his 
theory  of  morals,  yet  when  he  turned  to  examine  practical  ethical 
problems,  such  as  the  right  of  the  minority  to  freedom,  and  the 
rights  'of  women  of  equal  opportunity  with  men,  his  arguments 
proceed  unconsciously  from  ^  very  different  view  of  human 
nature.  He  recognised  the  organic  nature  of  man,  and  his 
organic  place  in  society.  He  virtually  conceived  of  the  moral 
end  as  the  fullest  development  of  personality,  and  that  such  an 
end  can  only  be  realised  in  society  which  conditions  the  exercise 
of  the  highest  human  faculties.  Morality,  therefore,  instead  of 
being  considered  as  an  external  and  conventional  code,  in  some 
way  imposed  on  the  natural  impulses  of  the  individual  becomes 
the  expression  of  his  inner  ideal  of  worth  in  characteristic  human 
action  or  conduct. 

This  view  of  morality  is  virtually  the  position  of  the  self- 
realisation  school  of  ethics,  which  appears  in  the  last  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century  and  finds  its  expression  in  the  works  of  Green, 
Muirhead,  Bradley  and  others.  As  we  noted  in  the  introductory 
chapter,  the  years  after  1859  and  the  publication  of  the  "Origin  of 
Species"  were   years   of  controversy.     Mill   had   carried   ethical 

•""Subjection  of  Women,"  p.  76,  Lippincott  &  Co.,  1869. 
n.  c,  p.  167. 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS.  6 1 

theory  beyond  naturalism.  But  naturalism  received  strong  rein- 
forcements from  the  doctrine  of  evolution  which  seemed  to  offer 
another  form  of  naturalistic  interpretation  for  the  development, 
and  therefore  for  the  existence  of  moral  phenomena.  But  the 
evolutionary  principle  which  was  rightly  felt  to  be  essential  to 
scientific  and  sound  moral  speculation,  came  to  English  ethics 
through  another  channel,  and  was  presented  as  a  foundation 
concept  in  Hegelian  idealism.  This  body  of  theory  offset  to 
a  marked  degree  any  retrogressive  tendency  for  ethics  that  might 
come  with  Darwinian  naturalism. 

The  interest  in  German  metaphysics  which  had  been  stimu- 
lated in  England  by  Coleridge  and  Carlyle,  strengthened  an 
already  existing  body  of  native  English  idealistic  speculation 
which  had  been  maintained  in  unbroken  line  from  Herbert  of 
Cherbury,  Henry  More,  and  the  Cambridge  Platonists,  through 
Shaftesbury,  Hutchinson,  Reid  and  other  members  of  the  Scottish 
Common  Sense  School.  In  the  course  of  this  independent 
development  certain  confused  concepts,  which  had  caused  Hobbcs 
in  the  seventeenth  century  to  turn  from  rationalism  to  naturalism 
to  explain  the  fact  of  morality,  had  become  defined  and  cleared 
of  ambiguity.  The  difference  between  the  intellectual  and  moral 
ideal,  or  end  of  action,  had  been  pointed  out  by  Henry  More. 
The  essential  difference  between  the  intellectual  and  moral 
faculties,  had  been  incorporated  in  the  very  structure  of  English 
ethical  thought  by  Hume.  Cudworth  had  sharply  distinguished 
between  innate  and  self-evident  moral  truths,  and  the  Scottish 
School  had  pointed  out  the  diiference  between  the  moral  ideal, 
inherent  in  the  will,  and  moral  principles,  or  generalisations  made 
from  observing  acts  of  conduct.  Thus  there  was  present  to  the 
nineteenth  century  thinkers  a  positive  body  of  idealistic  theory. 
When  this,  and  the  new  concepts  of  the  organic  nature  of  man 
coming  from  the  rich  field  of  biological  and  evolutional  theory 
passed  before  the  fine  spiritual  insight  of  a  Martineau,  and 
through  the  powerful  analytical  intellect  of  a  Green,  the  self- 
realisation  view  of  morals  became  not  merely  a  branch  of  philos- 
ophy, but  the  sine  qua  non  of  all  philosophic  speculation.     It  has 


62  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

been  called  Hegelian  from  its  view  of  human  life  as  proceeding 
from  dim  impulse  to  conscious  self-realisation,  thus  transcending 
each  acquired  step  in  the  development  of  new  activities,  and  new 
human  powers.  It  is  more  correctly  named  Aristotelian  as  it 
regards  human  life  as  making  real  the  potential  moral  ideal 
implanted  back  of,  or  under,  or  prior  to,  all  conscious  manifesta- 
tions in  the  human  will. 

To  make  clear  the  relation  of  this  view  of  ethics  with  the  theory 
of  value  appearing  in  the  relative  shorter  course  of  economic 
development,  it  is  necessary  to  state  the  main  position  very 
briefly.  The  end  of  human  conduct,  the  ground  for  which  any 
form  of  action  is  undertaken  is  conceived  as  an  ideal  of  develop- 
able personality,  which  is  an  integral  part  of  human  nature  and 
gradually  becomes  explicit  in  consciousness.  The  self  in  activity 
appears  as  will.  Reflection  upon  acts  of  will  make  us  gradually 
conscious  of  the  type  of  person  we  wish  to  become,  or,  in  other 
words,  to  know  the  nature  of  our  moral  ideal.  To  the  extent 
that  the  ideal  is  consciously  known,  it  constitutes  a  standard  of 
judgment  which  is  immediate,  and  which  we  apply  directly  to 
phenomena  to  estimate  their  moral  worth.  The  moral  judgment 
is  the  immediate  application  of  an  ideal  standard  to  a  fact  of  con- 
duct. It  is  the  "ought"  which  judges  the  actual  in  the  light  of 
the  ideal;  not  the  "is"  or  intellectual  judgment,  which  relates  a 
perceived  fact  to  a  coherent  structure  of  knowledge.  The  moral 
faculty,  therefore,  is  the  self  applying  the  ideal  immediately  in  a 
judgment  of  conduct. 

Moreover,  the  ideal  of  self,  or  the  standard  of  virtue,  always 
appears,  on  reflection  as  a  completed  concept,  even  though  we 
know  that  it  becomes  increasingly  definite  and  full  of  content 
with  every  act  of  will,  and  every  moral  decision  or  choice.  As 
such  it  is  a  regulative  ideal,  conceived  as  a  total  in  consciousness, 
over  against  which  we  measure  the  value  of  concrete  acts.  We 
say  "such  a  thought  or  action  was  or  was  not  worthy  of  us." 
In  this  case  we  apply  the  standard  to  the  act,  or  we  measure  the 
act  with  regard  to  its  place  in  the  total.     This  latter  concept  of 


THE   CONCEPT   OF    UTILITY    IN    ENGLISH    ETHICS.  63 

the  Total  and  Measure,  which  is  the  essence  of  the  Aristotelian 
ethics  of  the  End  and  the  Mean,  English  ethical  theory  arrived  at 
after  struggling  two  centuries  against  the  fatal  consequences  of  the 
external  and  mechanical  devices  of  naturalism.  The  import  of 
this  concept  becomes  of  supreme  interest  to  us  in  noting  the  effect 
on  economic  theory  of  the  same  naturalistic  hypotheses. 


CHAPTER  III. 
Total  Utility  and  the  Economic  Judgment. 

We  are  now  in  a  position  to  compare  critically  certain  under- 
lying concepts  in  modern  ethics  and  modern  economics,  and  to 
note  the  relation  between  these  two  branches  of  human  specula- 
tion, each  of  which  purports  to  explain  human  activity  according 
to  certain  postulates.  Briefly  to  recapitulate  we  have  seen  that  the 
trend  of  ethical  thinking  in  the  English  group  of  moralists  has 
been  away  from  a  naturalistic  interpretation  of  human  nature, 
and  away  from  an  external  and  mechanical  view  of  society,  gov- 
ernment and  institutions.  It  has  tended  toward  an  idealistic 
position,  in  which  human  activity,  or  the  operation  of  the  will, 
is  the  objective  expression  of  an  immediate  ideal  of  personality. 
Regarding  such  a  philosophy  of  human  activity  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  End,  we  may  call  it  Idealism,  as  the  end  which 
any  act  of  conduct  seeks  to  realise  is  an  ideal  implanted  in  the 
will,  not  a  generalisation  from  the  data  of  experience,  though 
gaining  content  by  the  operation  of  the  functioning  self  in  the 
data  of  experience.  Looking  at  the  various  forms  of  human  ac- 
tivity, or  the  will  in  operation,  this  view  of  human  conduct  may 
be  called  Voluntarism,  or  the  interpretation  of  ethical  motive  in 
terms  of  will,  as  opposed  to  Inteilectualism  or  the  interpretation 
of  ethical  motive  in  terms  of  intellect. 

Coincident  with  this  development  in  English  ethics,  economic 
theory  passed,  in  its  turn,  from  its  purely  objective  stage  of  de- 
scriptive studies  in  industrial  and  commercial  conditions,  to  seek 
for  the  fundamentals  of  the  science  and  especially  to  seek  an  ex- 
planation of  the  phenomena  of  value,  in  the  psychological  nature 
of  man.  Theoretical  economics  seeks  to  account  for  man's  char- 
acteristic actions  in  the  world  of  natural  goods  and  limited  supply 
from  the  nature  of  his  inner  necessities  and  demands,  not  from 
the  fortuitous  arrangement  of  the  natural  goods  themselves.  More- 

(64) 


TOTAL   UTILITY   AND   THE   ECONOMIC   JUDGMENT.  65 

over,  having  early  assumed  a  naturalistic  interpretation  of  human 
nature,  reflected  from  the  current  utilitarian  philosophy  of  mor- 
als, the  "Classical"  economists  of  the  English  school  were  forced 
to  make  one  exception  after  another  to  their  fundamental  hy- 
pothesis, encountering  many  of  the  same  logical  difficulties  as 
the  utilitarian  moralists,  until  the  body  of  exceptions  was  greater 
than  the  body  of  positive  theory,  and  the  naturalistic  account  of 
economic  motive  was  abandoned  for  a  semi-idealistic  interpre- 
tation. 

The  transition  in  economic  speculation  from  a  purely  objective 
to  a  subjective-objective  concept  of  value  appears  in  the  history 
of  English  economic  theory  in  two  aspects.  From  one  point  of 
view  it  appears  as  the  history  of  the  modifications  of  Adam 
Smith's  Labour  Theory  of  Value^  in  the  works  of  his  successors, 
Malthus,  Ricardo,  Senior,  and  J.  S.  Mill.  Adam  Smith  stated, 
(not  without  considerable  qualification,  be  it  noted,)  that  the 
value  of  a  good  is  determined  by  the  amount  of  labour  which 
went  to  produce  it.  "If  among  a  nation  of  hunters,  for  example, 
it  usually  costs  twice  the  labour  to  kill  a  beaver  which  it  does 
to  kill  a  deer,  one  beaver  should  naturally  exchange  for  or  be 
worth  two  deer."^  Labour  is  used  in  this  early  formulation'  of 
the  theory  of  value  in  the  sense  of  disability,  toil  or  pain  which 
must  be  recompensed  by  the  pleasure  which  the  product  of  labour 
afiPords.  Both  the  labour  expended  (labour  costs)  and  the  pleas- 
ure experienced  in  the  object  produced  are  measurable  according 
to  the  "hedonic  calculus"  of  pleasure  and  pain.  Value  is  the 
expression  of  this  measurability. 

In  criticising  this  theory  Malthus^  pointed  out  that  in  many 
passages   Adam   Smith   uses   as  the  measure  of  value,  not  the 

'For  a  careful  analysis  of  Adam  Smith's  "Labour  Cost  and  Labour 
Command  Theories  of  Value,"  see  "A  History  and  Criterion  of  the 
Labour  Theory  of  Value  in  English  Political  Economy,"  by  Alfred 
Whitaker,  Columbia  Press,  1904. 

"'Wealth  of  Nations,"  Bk.  ],  Chap.  VL 

'T.  R.  Malthus,  'Trinciplcs  of  Political  Economy,"  1819,  Chap.  II, 
Sec.  IV,  2d  edition   (Pickering),  p.  89. 


66  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

amount  of  labour  expended  in  producing  the  good,  but  the 
amount  of  other  men's  labour  which  the  good  can  command  in 
exchange,  and  that  in  this  aspect  only  can  labour  be  said  to  be 
a  measure  of  value.  That  is,  the  value  of  a  good  to  the  owner 
or  the  producer  represents  the  amount  of  toil  and  disutility  it 
can  ward  off.  Both  interpretations  rest  on  a  concept  of  the 
calculability  of  pleasures  and  pains ;  on  the  fact  that  the  pleasure 
or  satisfaction  derived  from  the  use  or  the  exchange  power  of 
the  good  is  in  some  way  commensurable  with  the  labour  and  pain 
of  producing  it. 

Ricardo,  accepting  Adam  Smith's  cost  rather  than  his  com- 
mand theory,  pointed  out  that  if  labour  were  to  serve  as  a  uni- 
versal criterion  for  valuation,  the  labour  cost  concept  must  be 
materially  modified.  In  the  first  place  labour  costs  can  never 
measure  the  value  of  absolutely  scarce  or  completely  monopo- 
lised goods.  Their  supply  is  definitely  limited,  and  their  value 
is  determined  by  the  strength  of  the  "effectual  demand"  for 
them.  Secondly,  the  element  of  utility  or  usefulness  is  of  para- 
mount importance.  "If  a  commodity  were  in  no  way  useful 
.  .  .  it  would  be  destitute  of  exchangeable  value,  however 
scarce  it  might  be,  or  whatever  quantity  of  labour  might  be 
necessary  to  procure  it."*  Ricardo  further  modifies  the  concept 
labour  costs  as  the  measure  of  value  by  drawing  attention  to 
the  fact  ( I )  that  labour  dififers  in  quality ;  skilled  labour  receiv- 
ing a  greater  recompense  than  unskilled,  as  it  produces  goods  of  a 
higher  value;  (2)  that  the  past  labour  which  went  to  produce 
the  tool  or  implement  with  which  present  labour  works  must  be 
calculated  with  present  labour  costs ;  (3)  that  the  varying  degrees 
of  durability  of  the  capital  with  which  labour  is  combined,  as 
well  as  the  labour  costs, ^  are  determining  factors  in  the  value 
of  the  finished  product.  In  a  letter  to  McCulloch,  Ricardo  ex- 
presses his  modified  labour  theory  of  value  as  follows:  "Objects 
of  utility,  produced  by  labour,  and  capable  of  further  production 
by  the  application  of  more  labour,  have  normal  values  in  pro- 

^David  Ricardo,  "Principles  of  Political  Economy,"  Chap.  I,  Sec.  2. 
'"Letters  to  McCulloch,"  p.  71. 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  67 

portion  to  the  total  quantity  of  labour  required  to  produce  them, 
except  that  the  proportionality  is  disturbed  by  the  employment, 
with  labour,  of  capital  of  varying  degrees  of  durability." 

John  Stuart  Mill,  the  last  of  the  "Classical  Economists/'  as 
he  was  the  last  of  the  "Utilitarians,"  adopted  Ricardo's  modifica- 
tions to  the  labour  theory  of  value  (which  had  now  come  to  be 
called  the  Cost  of  Production  Theory)  and  applied  it  to  deter- 
mine the  value  of  economic  goods  which  he  divided  into  three 
groups:  (i)  scarce  goods,  or  those  absolutely  limited  in  quan- 
tity;^ (2)  goods  freely  reproducible  by  the  application  of  labour 
and  capital;  (3)  goods  which  may  be  increased  by  the  applica- 
tion of  labour  and  capital,  but  with  diminishing  returns.  Values, 
which  Mill  defines  first  as  "purchasing  power,"  and  later  as  the 
"ratio  between  demand  and  supply,"  is  determined  in  the  case  of 
the  first  group  of  goods  by  the  strength  of  the  effectual  demand, 
as  the  supply  is  absolutely  limited.  The  value  of  the  third  group 
which  includes  all  agricultural  goods  and  many  industrial  prod- 
ucts is  determined  by  the  "cost  of  that  portion  of  the  supply 
brought  to  the  market  at  the  greatest  expense,"  or  by  the  marginal 
costs.  Only  the  value  of  freely  reproducible  goods  (though  Mill 
conceives  the  category  to  embrace  "the  majority  of  all  things 
that  are  bought  and  sold")  is  determined  by  labour  costs,  and 
"expenditure"  or  capital  costs.  Thus,  by  the  middle  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  when  Mill  declared  that  "happily  there  is  nothing 
in  the  Laws  of  Value  for  the  present  or  any  future  writer  to 
clear  up"  the  positive  body  of  theory  only  logically  accounted 
for  the  value  of  freely  reproducible  goods.  Scarce  goods,  goods 
produced  under  monopoly  conditions,  goods  produced  with 
diminishing  returns,  had  to  be  valued  according  to  other  laws 
which  were  regarded  as  deviations  from,  or  exceptions  to  the 
Law  of  Labour  Costs. 

From  another  point  of  view  this  same  transition  from  an  objec- 
tive to  a  subjective-objective  concept  of  value,  may  be  regarded 
as  the  gradual  recognition  of  the  significance  of  the  factor  De- 
mand, and  of  the  functional  relation  between  demand  and  sup- 

'Mill,  "Political  Economy,"  Bk.  Ill,  Chap.  V,  Sec.   i. 


68  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

plyj  Intimately  connected  with  this  recognition  was  the  grow- 
ing emphasis  on  utility,  first  as  an  indispensable  factor  in  value, 
later  as  the  criterion  of  value.  Adam  Smith  dismissed  the  prob- 
lem of  utility  or  "Value  in  Use"  with  a  word  and  turned  to  the 
exclusive  consideration  of  Value  in  Exchange.  Ricardo,  as  we 
noted,  regarded  "utility"  not  as  the  measure  of  value,  but  as 
"absolutely  essential  to  it,"  but  failed  to  analyse  this  "essential" 
or  its  relation  to  demand.  Malthus^  was  the  first  of  the  English 
economists  to  formulate  what  Prof.  Cassel  calls  the  concept  of 
the  "mechanism^  of  the  market  .  .  .  and  the  mutual  de- 
pendence of  the  different  factors  operating  in  it."  Though 
adhering  to  Adam  Smith's  Labour  Command  theory  of  value 
in  general,  in  the  determination  of  market  price,  he  concludes 
that  "the  value  of  commodities  in  money,  or  their  prices,  are 
determined  by  the  demand  for  them ;  compared  with  the  supply 
of  them.  And  this  law  appears  to  be  so  general,  that  probably 
not  a  single  instance  of  a  change  in  price  could  be  found,  which 
may  not  be  satisfactorily  traced  to  some  previous  change  in  the 
state  of  demand  and  supply."^"  Malthus  defined  demand  as  "the 
will  to  purchase,  combined  with  the  means  of  purchasing,"  but 
did  not  analyse  this  factor  of  will  in  value  nor  relate  it  to  the 
current  utilitarian  discussions  as  to  the  motives  for  voluntary 
action. 

Malthus's  "Principles  of  Political  Economy"  was  published  in 
1820,  three  years  after  Ricardo's  work  of  the  same  name,  and  had 
far  less  general  influence  on  the  economic  thought  of  the  times 
than  the  more  forcible  but  less  suggestive  work  of  his  prede- 
cessor. In  applying  the  Laws  of  Cost  to  all  the  phenomena  of 
value,    Ricardo's    immediate    followers    turned    their    attention 

'For  an  illuminating  account  of  the  development  of  the  idea  of  the 
functional  relationship  between  supply  and  demand  as  applied  to  inter- 
est on  capital,  see  "The  Nature  and  Necessity  of  Interest,"  by  Professor 
G.  Cassel.     Macmillan  &  Co.,  1908. 

"Malthus,  "Principles  of  Political  Economy,"  Chap.  II,  Sec.  2. 

'1.  c,  p.  31. 

^1.  c,  p.  62. 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT,  69 

solely  to  problems  of  exchange  value  and  to  the  nature  of  the 
objective  factor,  economic  goods.  Senior  ("Outlines  of  Politi- 
cal Economy,"  1836),  in  stressing  again  the  organic  connection 
of  demand  and  supply  in  the  determination  of  market  price," 
appears  as  Malthus's  logical  successor.  But  he  surpassed  his 
master  in  his  analysis  of  utility  not  as  "an  intrinsic  quality  of 
things,"  but  as  expressing  their  relations  to  the  pains  and  pleas- 
ures of  mankind,  and  hence  the  "necessary  constituent  of 
value,"^-  and  in  attempting  to  formulate  some  law  of  human 
wants  and  desires  which  might  serve  to  account  for  the  varia- 
tions of  the,  as  yet  unanalysed,  factor  demand.  Senior's  Laiv  of 
Variety  gives  us  the  first  statement  in  modern  economic  theory 
of  the  operation  of  human  wants  in  terms  of  quantitative  varia- 
tion. "Our  desires  do  not  aim  so  much  at  quantity  as  at  diversity. 
Not  only  are  there  limits  to  the  pleasure  which  commodities  of 
any  given  class  can  afiford,  but  the  pleasure  diminishes  in  a  rapidly 
increasing  ratio  long  before  those  limits  are  reached.  Two 
articles  of  the  same  kind  will  seldom  afford  twice  the  pleasure 
of  one,  and  still  less  will  ten  give  five  times  the  pleasure  of  two 
.  .  .  .  Banfield's  "Cambridge  Lectures"  were  published  in 
1844  arid  contained  another  psychological  generalisation  as  to  the 
operation  of  human  desires,  under  the  title  "Law  of  the  Sub- 
ordination of  Wants."  Proceeding  from  the  axiom  that  the 
satisfaction  of  a  primary  want  gives  rise  to  a  secondary  want,  he 
evolved  the  concept  of  a  graduated  scale  of  human  wants.  "In 
proportion  as  food  grows  abundant  the  other  wants  rise  in 
importance  and  a  constantly  expanding  series  of  desires  is  awak- 
ened, which  are  classified  according  to  their  different  grades  of 
pressure  ....  An  examination  of  the  nature  and  intensity 
of  man's  wants  shows  that  this  connection  between  them  gives 
to  Political  Economy  its  scientific  basis.  The  first  proposition 
in  the  theory  of  consumption  is  that  the  satisfaction  of  c"oery 
lower  zvant  in  the  scale  creates  a  desire  of  a  higher  character." 

"Senior,  "Political  Economy,"  6th  edition,  Introduction,  p.  7. 
""Encyclopaedia  Metropolitana,"  p.  133.     Quoted  from  Jevons'  "Political 
Economy,"  p.  53. 


•JO  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

Both  Senior  and  Banfield^^  took  into  account  qualitative  differ- 
ences in  wants  such  as  primary  and  secondary  wants,  or  wants  of 
a  higher  or  lower  order,  and  quantitative  differences  in  the  inten- 
sity of  the  want  felt  or  of  the  satisfaction  experienced  in  satisfy- 
ing the  want. 

These  "Laws"  of  Senior  and  Banfield,  both  crude  and  tentative 
accounts  of  the  psychology  of  wants,  served  as  points  of  departure 
for  Jevons'  analysis  in  1871  of  the  subject  factor  of  demand  in 
the  ratio  of  value,  and  for  his  revolutionary  attitude  toward  the 
whole  content  of  the  economic  theory  of  his  time.  Problems  of 
value  and  price  had  been  approached  from  the  side  of  cost 
of  production ;  from  the  side  of  supply.  Expressed  solely  in 
objective  terms,  the  phenomena  of  value  could  not  be  explained 
without  constant  exception  and  qualification.  Scarcity  prices, 
monopoly  prices,  "fashion  and  novelty"  prices,  the  high  price 
of  relatively  useless  things  and  the  low  price  of  relatively  neces- 
sary things  had  created  from  the  time  of  Ricardo  to  John  Stuart 
{Mill  a  body  of  exceptions  greater  than  the  positive  body  of  law. 
In  the  introduction  to  the  first  edition  of  his  "Theory  of  Political 
Economy"  Jevons  takes  issue  with  the  whole  body  of  the  so-called 
"classical  theory"  of  his  day.  "When  at  length  a  true  system  of 
Economics  comes  to  be  established,  it  will  be  seen  that  that  able 
but  wrong-headed  man,  David  Ricardo,  shunted  the  car  of  Eco- 
nomic Science  onto  a  wrong  line,  a  line,  however,  on  which  it  was 
further  urged  toward  confusion  by  his  equally  able  and  wrong- 
headed  admirer,  John  Stuart  Mill.  There  were  economists,  such 
as  Malthus  and  Senior,  who  had  la  better  comprehension  of  the 
true  doctrines  (though  not  free  from  the  Ricardian  errors)  but 
they  were  drawn  out  of  the  field  by  the  unity  and  influence  of  the 
Ricardo-Mill  School." 

Jevons  then  proceeds  to  state  his  position.  "Value  depends 
entirely  upon  utility,"^*  i.  e.,  on  the  recognised  relation  between 
the  want  felt  for  the  good  (Demand)  and  the  amount  of  the 
good  available  (Supply).     "Labour  is  found  often  to  determine 

"Banfield,  "Organisation  of  Industry,"  Lecture  III,  p.  60. 
"Jevons,  "Theory  of  Political  Economy,"  Chap.  I. 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  7I 

value,  but  only  in  an  indirect  manner,  by  varying  the  degree  of 
utility  of  the  commodity  through  an  increase  or  limitation  of 
supply."  To  frame  exact  laws,  then,  of  the  variation  of  utility,  the 
subjective  factor  must  be  calculated  as  precisely  as  the  objec- 
tive factor :  in  other  words,  feelings,  wants  and  motives  must  be 
measured.  The  calculus  of  utilities  then  must  depend  on  a  cal- 
culus of  pleasure-pain. 

Such  a  concept  Jevons  found  elaborated  to  the  utmost  detail 
in  current  utilitarian  ethics.  "The  object  of  economics  is  to 
maximise  happiness  by  purchasing  pleasure,  as  it  were,  at  the 
lowest  cost  of  pain,"  Jevons  states  in  his  introduction,  and  adds 
"I  have  no  hesitation  in  accepting  the  utilitarian  theory  of  morals, 
which  does  uphold  the  effect  upon  the  happiness  of  mankind  as 
the  criterion  of  right  and  wrong.  .  .  .  My  present  purpose 
is  accomplished  in  pointing  out  the  hierarchy  of  feeling,  and 
assigning  a  proper  place  to  the  pleasures  and  pains  with  which 
the  economist  deals.  It  is  the  lowest  rank  of  feelings  which  we 
here  treat.  The  calculus  of  utility  aims  at  supplying  the  ordi- 
nary wants  of  man  at  the  least  cost  of  labour. "^^  Following 
Bentham's  account  of  the  "circumstances"  which  determine  the 
amount  of  a  pleasure  or  pain,  Jevons  found  pleasures  and  pains  to 
be  quantities  of  two  dimensions.  They  may  be  measured  according 
to  intensity  and  duration.  Moreover,  pleasures  may  be  regarded 
as  positive,  pains  as  negative.  "The  algebraic  sum  of  a  series  of 
pleasures  and  pains  will  be  obtained  by  adding  the  pleasures 
together  and  the  pains  together,  and  then  striking  the  balance 
by  substracting  the  smaller  amount  from  the  greater. "^° 

With  this  concept  of  the  calculability  of  pleasure-pain  and  the 
possibility  of  a  sum  of  pleasure ;  and  with  Senior  and  Banfield's 
"Laws  of  Wants"  to  account  for  the  order  in  which  wants  appear, 
the  subjective  factor  in  the  problem  of  value  could  be  measured 
as  exactly  as  the  objective  factor  of  supply.  Also  utility  express- 
ing the  functional  relation  between  the  two  factors  could  now  be 
exactly  expressed.     "Utility  may  be  treated  as  a  qmntity  of  two 

"Jevons,  1.  c,  p.  23. 
"Jevons,  1.  c,  p.  32. 


72  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

dimensions,  one  dimension  consisting  in  the  quantity  of  the  com- 
modity, and  another  in  the  intensity  of  the  effect  produced  upon 
consumer."^^  Total  utiHty  would  thus  represent  all  the  satis- 
faction coming  from  the  consumption  of  any  stock  of  goods;  or 
the  satisfaction  by  means  of  economic  goods  of  any  conscious  scale 
of  wants ;  the  degree  of  utility,  the  satisfaction  coming  from  the 
consumption  of  any  specific  increment  of  a  stock  of  goods ;  and 
the  general  law,  "that  the  degree  of  utility  varies  with  the  quantity 
of  commodity,  and  ultimately  decreases  as  that  commodity 
increases."^®  The  degree  of  utility  of  the  last  increment  con- 
sumed, or  the  next  to  be  consumed  is  the  Hnal,  or  as  it  is  usually 
termed  the  marginal  utility,  and  measures  the  utility  of  the 
whole ;  in  other  words,  it  measures  value. 

And  so  by  a  curious  twist,  the  naturalistic  psychology  of  utili- 
tarian ethics  which  had  steadily  lost  ground  in  the  later  years  of 
utilitarian  development,  became  suddenly  rehabilitated  by  Jevons 
as  the  psychological  premise  for  the  new  school  of  economics. 
Economic  theory,  strongly  utilitarian  from  the  first  formulation 
of  the  Labour  Theory  of  Value,  had  encountered  all  the  difficulties 
of  trying  to  construe  the  phenomena  of  value  in  objective,  mate- 
rialistic terms.  When  the  facts  would  no  longer  justify  such  par- 
tial treatment,  and  when  the  recognition  of  the  importance  of 
demand  and  want  as  determining  factors  culminated  in  Jevons' 
analysis  of  utility,  he  construed  the  subjective  factor  not  in  ideal- 
istic, but  in  utilitarian  terms,  and  grounded  economic  reasoning 
frankly  on  the  ethics  of  naturalism.  In  John  Stuart  Mill's  works 
we  see  the  transition  in  English  philosophical  thought  from  utili- 
tarianism to  idealism.  In  Jevons'  "Theory  of  Pohtical  Economy" 
we  find  the  conscious  realisation  that  the  field  of  economics  is  not 
wholly  cost,  labour  and  supply,  and  that  some  explanation  must 
be  given  of  the  varying  human  wants  and  desires.  But  in  demol- 
ishing John  Stuart  Mill's  "Political  Economy"  and  dubbing  him 
"equally  wrong-headed"  with  Ricardo,  Jevons  did  not  realise  that 

"Jevons,  1.  c,  p.  47. 

"Jevons,  1.  c,  p.  53.  .^ 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  73 

the  step  Mill  had  taken  in  his  ethical  theory  was  also  an  inevi- 
table one  for  the  theory  of  economics. 

With  this  brief  sketch  of  the  trend  of  English  economic  rea- 
soning in  mind,  we  are  now  in  a  position  to  bring  together  the 
various  concepts  whose  development  we  have  traced  in  Chapter 
II,  and  endeavor  to  determine  their  essential  bearing  in  the  for- 
mulation and  analysis  of  the  Subjective  Factor  in  economic 
theory.  In  order  to  determine  the  essentially  economic  char- 
acteristics of  the  "Subjective  Factor"  that  we  may  be  in  a  position 
to  compare  them  directly  with  the  ethical,  we  must  (i)  give  a 
fuller  statement  of  what  we  termed  in  the  introductory  chapter 
the  subjective-objective  nature  of  economic  phenomena,  with  the 
consequent  methodological  treatment  which  such  a  concept 
involves.  We  shall  then  have  a  point  of  view  from  which  (2)  to 
analyse  the  concepts  of  the  end  or  total,  the  means  or  margin  ; 
and  the  nature  of  the  judgment  implicit  in  economic  theory ;  and 
(3)  to  indicate  the  likeness  and  differences  between  these  con- 
cepts and  their  ethical  prototypes ;  and  finally,  in  view  of  the  na- 
ture of  the  characteristics  which  mark  an  action  as  ethical  or  eco- 
nomic to  offer  (4)  a  possible  canon  of  distinction  that  may  serve 
in  defining  the  respective  fields  of  human  activity,  and  to  separate 
phenomena  according  to  these  fields.  If  this  could  be  success- 
fully accomplished,  economic  speculation  would  not  only  gain 
in  precision,  but  its  relation  to  ethical  theory  would  be  so  defined 
that  the  theoretical  economist  could  confidently  draw  on  the 
wealth  of  ethical  argument,  both  ancient  and  modern,  to  test  all 
advances  in  theory,  and  likewise  could  prove  the  validity  of  the 
present  postulates,  by  submitting  them  to  the  analogous  argu- 
ments for  and  against  their  prototypes  in  the  ethical  field. 

Utilitarian  clhics  of  the  Benthamite  form  has  disappeared 
from  the  thinking  world,  the  present  utilitarians  being  so  much 
more  "Evolutionists"  than  hedonists,  that  they  can  hardly  be 
classed  under  the  old  name.  But  utilitarian  postulates  still  per- 
sist in  much  of  our  economic  theory,  especially  in  such  concepts 
as  the  Calculus  of  Wants,  the  Calculus  of  Utilities,  Total  Utility 
and  Marginal  Utility.     These  are  capable,  as  we  shall  point  out, 


74  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

of  a  non-naturalistic  interpretation,  but  in  current  discussion  much 
of  the  argument  follows  the  traditional  reasoning  and  rests  on 
such  assumptions  as  a  "sum  of  pleasure"  the  "calculability  of 
pleasure-pain"  and  the  postulate  of  the  naturalistic  psychology. 
The  Labour  Theory  of  Value,  moreover,  still  persists  in  the  sur- 
plus Value  Theory  of  Capital  of  the  Marxian  socialists ;  and  the 
Labour  Theory  of  Value  whether  in  its  English  or  German  form 
rests  avowedly  on  a  hedonistic  interpretation  of  human  nature 
and  postulates  a  utilitarian  end  or  total. 

L     The  Subjective-objective  Nature  of  Economic  Science. 

Economic  science  is  then  seen  to  have  a  twofold  nature.  It 
is  not  a  purely  subjective  study  as  are  psychology  and  logic,  in 
the  sense  of  having  for  its  data  only  the  nature  of  consciousness 
and  functionings  of  the  self.  Nor  is  it  purely  objective  in  deal- 
ing only  with  matter  or  properties  which  may  be  measured.  It 
is  a  combination  of  the  subjective  and  objective;  and  more  than 
this,  in  economic  phenomena  the  subjective,  desiring  and  wanting 
human  factor  is  always  found  to  be  in  a  certain  relation  to  the 
world  of  fact,  or  "outer  nature."  Goods  which  might  be  proved 
to  exist,  fruit  on  another  planet,  gold  at  the  heart  of  the  earth, 
have  no  economic  validity  as  they  can  never  come  in  connection 
with  a  desiring  subject.  A  good  is  an  economic  phenomena  when 
it  stands  in  some  definite  relation  to  a  human  being.  A  human 
being  is  economic  to  the  extent,  and  only  to  the  extent,  to  which 
he  is  related  to  economic  goods.  The  relation,  moreover,  is 
functional  not  causal.  Without  human  desire  goods  have  no 
economic  aspect,  and  are  economic  only  to  the  extent  in  which 
they  are  desired.  Human  beings  are  economic  agents  to  the 
extent  to  which  they  depend  on  goods,  non-economic  in  those 
attributes  in  which  they  are  independent  of  all  goods.  Therefore 
"Man  is  a  function  of  Nature,"  or  "Nature  is  a  function  of  man" 
are  the  symbolic  expressions  for  this  economic  relation  of  func- 
tional dependence. 

In  view  of  this  relation  a  word  must  be  said  as  to  the  method 
of  economics,  which  is  seen  to  be  far  more  complicated  than  is 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  75 

usually  assumed  in  economic  text-books.  To  the  extent  that 
economic  phenomena  are  objective,  and  capable  of  being 
abstracted  from  the  subjective  factor,  they  are  adapted  to  the 
same  methodological  treatment  as  the  data  of  the  natural  sciences. 
Such  economic  facts  as  source  of  supply,  areas  of  production,  the 
facts  of  population,  and  nearly  all  the  phenomena  coming  under 
the  category  of  Exchange,  may  be  studied  indirectly  and  deduc- 
tively, may  be  classified  and  arranged,  and  to  a  certain  extent  may 
be  isolated  and  experimented  upon.  But  most  important  of  all 
they  may  be  counted  and  measured,  and  so  dealt  with  mathema- 
tically. The  almost  overwhelming  amount  of  material  available 
to  the  economic  student  from  the  advance  and  specialisation  of 
industrial  undertakings  make  applied  mathematical  methods  the 
only  practical  ones  for  dealing  with  complicated  industrial  and 
commercial  conditions.  The  statistical  method,  as  branch  of 
applied  mathematics,  is  employed  universally  as  the  only  conveni- 
ent method  for  dealing  with  this  class  of  facts,  and  is  almost 
coincident  in  its  field  with  what  we  have  designated  as  the  Objec- 
tive Factor.  By  the  use  of  diagrams,  statistics,  and  the  valuable 
formulae  which  have  been  obtained  by  the  use  of  the  Theory  of 
Probability,  the  applied  economist  is  enabled  to  handle  material 
which  would  be  totally  unavailable  were  he  restricted  to  methods 
of  enumeration  and  description.  He  is  also  able  to  predict  results 
of  social,  industrial  and  commercial  combinations,  and  to  calcu- 
late what  will  be  the  general  tendency  of  development  in  given 
social,  industrial  and  commercial  conditions. 

The  methods  of  applied  mathematics  may  be  used,  and  indeed 
must  be  used,  in  dealing  with  the  Objective  Factor  for  accumu- 
lating data,  and  arranging  material.  This  Objective  Factor, 
"Goods"  or  Supply,  when  abstracted  from  the  subjective-objec- 
tive economic  relation, — when  abstracted  from  the  person  want- 
ing the  goods,  or  demanding  the  supply — can  only  be  regarded 
as  quantity,  and  hence  can  only  be  measured.  It  may  be  measured 
mathematically,  but  it  may  not  be  valued  mathematically.  This  is 
an  important  point  to  note  in  view  of  the  great  interest  nowadays 
in  the  application  of  the  mathematical  method  to  economic  phe- 


76  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

nomena.  Value  is  the  judgment  of  "better"  or  "worse,"  not  "more" 
or  "less,"  hence  it  expresses  a  relation  of  quality,  and  depends  for 
its  solution  not  only  on  the  laws  of  goods  which  may  be  expressed 
mathematically,  but  also  on  the  psychological  nature  of  wants, 
which  being  intensities  and  feelings,  may  be  indicated  mathe- 
matically, but  are  not  capable  of  objective  measurement. 

This  leads  us  to  the  second  method  in  which  mathematics  may 
be  used  in  formulating  economic  data.  We  may  employ  the  nota- 
tion of  the  Theory  of  Functions  to  express  the  relations  existing 
between  the  Subjective  and  Objective  Factor.  This  relation  being 
a  functional  one  may  be  expressed  in  the  form  M  =  F  (n).  The 
functional  relation  of  demand  and  supply,  of  monopoly  force  and 
the  level  of  price,  and  of  all  the  complicated  phenomena  of  Ex- 
change which  deal  with  demand  and  not  with  mere  supply,  may  be 
expressed  in  the  form  of  a  functional  equation,  and  may  be  sub- 
mitted to  various  mathematical  operations  included  in  the  Theory 
of  Functions  and  the  Infinitesimal  Calculus. 

This  method  of  expressing  economic  relation  was  first  used  by 
Augustus  Cournot  in  his  "Mathematical  Principles  of  the  Theory 
of  Wealth"  appearing  in  France  in  1830.  Cournot  expressed  the 
relation  between  the  Subjective  Factor  of  demand,  and  the 
Objective  Factor  of  supply  in  the  terms  of  a  functional  equation, 
and  by  the  method  of  the  Differential  Calculus  developed  formulas 
expressing  price  relations  under  conditions  of  free-trade,  partial 
monopolies,  absolute  monopolies,  and  the  general  effect  of  taxa- 
tion on  monopoly  price,  competition  price,  etc.  In  the  course 
of  his  treatise  he  anticipated  the  marginal  utility  theory  of  value 
in  expressing  the  value-determining  factor  in  his  equations  as  the 
differential  coefficient.  But  his  work  had  no  effect  on  contem- 
porary economic  thought,  and  the  marginal  utility  theory  was 
developed  later  and  independently  by  Jevons  in  England  and 
Gossen  in  Germany.  Cournot's  work  comes  in  the  general  devel- 
opment of  the  theory  more  as  a  confirmation  than  a  transitional 
step.  Jevons  and  Gossen  both  used  the  method  of  the  differential 
calculus  to  express  the  formation  of  the  subjective  factor  in 
determining  value.     And  the  use  of  the  notation  of  pure  mathe- 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  TJ 

matics  for  expressing  economic  relations  finds  its  exponent  to-day 
in  the  works  of  Walras,  Pareto,  Ferrara,  Edgworth,  Wickstead 
and  many  others.  Professor  Marshall's  use  of  mathematics  is 
most  illuminating  in  the  many  examples  which  illustrate  his 
"Economic  Principles." 

But  the  use  of  the  notation  of  pure  mathematics  in  economic 
data  is  only  valid  for  conciseness  of  expression.  It  cannot  add 
new  facts.  Professor  Marshall  says  in  the  introduction  to  his 
"Principles" :  "The  chief  use  of  pure  mathematics  in  economic 
questions,  seems  to  be  in  helping  a  person  to  write  down  quickly, 
shortly  and  exactly  some  of  his  thoughts  for  his  own  use,  and  to 
make  sure  that  he  has  enough,  and  only  enough  premises  for 
his  conclusions  {i.  e.  that  his  equations  are  neither  more  nor  less 
in  numbers  than  his  unknowns) .  But  when  a  great  many  symbols 
have  to  be  used,  they  become  very  laborious  to  any  one  but  the 
writer  himself,  and  though  Cournot's  genius  must  give  a  new 
mental  activity  to  every  one  who  passes  through  his  hands,  and 
mathematicians  of  his  calibre  may  use  their  favorite  weapons  to 
clear  a  way  for  themselves  to  the  center  of  some  of  those  difficult 
problems  of  economic  theory,  of  which  only  the  outer  fringe  has 
yet  been  touched,  yet  it  seems  doubtful  whether  any  one  spends 
his  time  well  reducing  lengthy  translations  of  economic  doctrines 
into  mathematics  that  have  not  been  made  by  himself."  The  rea- 
son for  this  lies  in  the  very  subjective-objective  nature  of  eco- 
nomic phenomena,  which  we  have  discussed  above.  Man  stands 
in  a  functional  relation  to  economic  goods.  This  relation  may  for 
conciseness  be  expressed  as  a  differential  equation ;  variation  in 
demand  is  accompanied  by  variation  in  supply,  change  in  quan- 
tity or  quality  of  valuable  objects  is  accompanied  by  affective 
change  in  the  balancing  subject  in  the  economic  equation.  But 
though  the  Subjective  and  Objective  Factors  may  be  expressed 
in  relation,  it  does  not  mean  that  they  are  commensurable  terms, 
or  that  they  may  be  reduced  to  any  common  denominator.  The 
objective  world  of  things  exists  in  space  and  time  and  may  be 
measured.  The  subjective  world  of  want,  feeUng  and  will  are 
intensities.     They  may  indeed  be  arranged  according  to  greater 


78  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

or  less  intensity,  as  we  shall  see  later,  but  they  can  never  be 
measured;  first  because  they  always  appear  successively  in  con- 
sciousness, never  simultaneously,  and  therefore  do  not  admit  of 
direct  comparison :  and  secondly,  because  a  unit  of  measure  for  a 
psychic  activity  is  lacking. 

The  use  of  the  pure  mathematical  method  then,  in  expressing 
economic  relations  is  valid  only  for  concise  expression;  to  "help 
a  person  write  down  quickly,  shortly  and  exactly  some  of  his  own 
thoughts  for  his  own  use."  As  it  uses  symbols  to  express  rela- 
tions existing  between  incommensurable  factors,  it  is  highly  use- 
ful for  testing  logical  hypotheses  and  verifying  logical  conclu- 
sions. But  it  is  extremely  doubtful  whether  such  a  method  can 
ever  add  new  facts  concerning  economic  relations.  It  certainly 
could,  were  both  sides  of  the  equation  commensurable,  could 
human  desire  be  measured  by  some  unit  analogous  to  units  of 
physical  measurement.  It  could  develop  a  new  notation  or  sym- 
bolism were  both  sides  of  the  economic  equation  correspondingly 
incommensurable ;  were  "goods"  and  the  phenomena  of  outer 
nature  the  expression  of  a  world  will  seeking  self-utterance,  as 
human  wants  are  the  evidence  of  the  human  will  striving  for 
realisation  and  completion.  Unless  we  are  prepared  to  ascend 
to  a  very  misty  metaphysical  region  and  seek  a  mathematical  sym- 
bolic which  will  transcend  all  subjective-objective  distinctions,  we 
must  content  ourselves  with  the  complicated  but  intelligible  divi- 
sions of  economic  method  which  the  dual  nature  of  the  phenomena 
demands.  The  Objective  Factor,  being  commensurable,  may  be 
dealt  with  mathematically,  and  lends  itself  admirably  to  statisti- 
cal treatment.  The  relation  between  the  subjective  and  objective 
factors  may  be  indicated  by  the  symbols  of  the  Calculus  for  pre- 
cision, but  the  factors  being  themselves  incommensurable  terms, 
no  new  knowledge  concerning  economic  relations  may  be  obtained 
by  this  process.  It  remains  then,  to  note  what  method  must  be 
employed  in  determining  the  subjective  factor. 

In  view  of  the  distinction  made  in  the  introduction,  the  Subjec- 
tive Factor  in  the  economic  process  (the  human  being  as  the 
wanting  or  desiring  subject)   may  be  regarded  as  the  data  for 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  79 

either  psychological  or  ethical  investigation.  Regarding  the  emer- 
gence of  wants  as  a  form  of  activity  of  the  functioning  self,  a 
study  of  the  nature  of  want,  and  a  formulation  of  the  laws  of 
want,  form  a  branch  of  the  science  of  psychology,  and  thus  con- 
form to  the  methodology  of  that  science.  The  principal  methods 
for  dealing  with  psychological  data  have  been  self-introspection, 
observation  of  psychical  manifestations  in  others  and  experimen- 
tation. The  first  two  methods  have  been  employed  in  all  investiga- 
tions as  to  the  nature  of  want,  and  the  order  of  emergence  of 
wants  which  since  the  time  of  Jevons  and  Gossen  have  played 
such  an  important  role  in  economic  theory.  Banfield's  Law  of 
the  Subordination  of  Wants,  Gossen's  Laws  of  Sensibility  and 
the  Hedonic  Maxima,  Menger's  "Bediirfniss  Scala,"  Pantaleoni's 
Law  of  Elasticity,  and  the  "Positive  and  Negative  Expansion  of 
Wants"  are  all  the  results  of  introspection  and  observation.  In 
Dr.  Cuhel's  "Theory  of  Wants:  a  theoretical  investigation  in  the 
boundary  land  between  Economics  and  Psychology,"  to  mention 
one  of  the  latest  additions  to  the  study  of  the  subjective  factor, 
the  same  methods  are  used,  and  the  inferences  drawn  from  the 
analysis  of  various  concepts  of  want,  are  the  results  of  such  pro- 
found insight  and  logical  acumen  that  his  conclusions  may  not  be 
passed  over  by  any  student  of  the  psychological  element  in  Eco- 
nomic data.  It  is  very  doubtful  whether  other  methods  which 
have  been  fruitful  in  the  field  of  psychology  would  have  any 
value  if  applied  to  economic  phenomena.  Isolation  of  economic 
phenomena  and  direct  experimentation  is  practically  impossible: 
the  organic  connection  of  the  two  factors  is  the  essential  economic 
relation.  Certain  economic  relations  may  be  isolated,  or  rather 
abstracted  for  the  purpose  of  analysing  their  component  parts. 
The  Classical  economists,  for  example,  abstracted  the  productive 
process  from  all  the  influences  of  monopolies,  and  fornuilated 
laws  of  production  under  condition  of  free  competition,  which 
they  admitted  actually  could  not  exist.  The  method  is  admirable 
for  precision  of  exposition,  but  of  very  questionable  scientific 
value.  Again  isolated  groups  of  individuals  may  very  profitably 
be  studied  with  the  view  of  determining  the  laws  of  intensity  and 


80  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

emergence  of  wants  in  a  restricted  environment.  This  was  von 
Thiinen's  method  in  "Der  isoHrte  Staat"  and  has  been  used  in 
numerous  modern  sociological  investigations  as  to  the  extent  of 
wants  satisfied  in  groups  with  varying  incomes.  But  in  such  cases 
it  is  the  environment  which  is  limited,  not  the  want,  and  the 
results  of  such  observation  is  not  to  learn  new  facts  as  to  the  laws 
of  wants,  but  only  the  extent  to  which  want,  which  is  a  universal 
phenomenon,  may  realise  itself  in  the  face  of  obvious  limitation. 

But  passing  from  the  psychological  nature  of  want  as  an  aspect 
of  the  functionary  self,  wants  may  be  studied  in  another  relation ; 
as  evidences  of  the  nature  of  the  End,  which  in  the  case  of  any 
individual,  or  group  of  individuals  with  a  common  or  social  end, 
determines  the  direction  of  this  activity.  Human  wants,  then,  in 
view  of  their  teleological  significance,  as  expressions  of  the 
purpose  and  plan  of  life,  are  ethical  phenomena,  and  hence  are 
subject  to  the  methodological  treatment  of  ethics,  or  the  Science 
of  the  End.  Though  ethics  is  a  subjective-objective  study  to 
the  degree  that  the  realisation  of  the  end  only  comes  into  con- 
sciousness through  the  course  of  an  objective  activity  which  we 
call  the  "conduct  of  life,"  nevertheless  it  is  freed  from  the 
objective  world  of  limited  supply,  which  determines  the  subjec- 
tive factor  in  economic  relation  and  gives  it  its  economic  char- 
acter. The  method  of  ethics,  therefore,  is  the  self  dealing  imme- 
diately with  the  self,  and  observing  other  selves.  Self-analysis 
and  observation  are  the  only  methods  we  can  use  to  piece  together 
those  fragmentary  and  disjointed  facts  which  appear  as  "habitual 
conduct,"  "implusive  acts,"  "instinct,"  "imitation,"  "the  expres- 
sion of  the  individual  character"  in  order  to  form  some  idea  of 
the  plan  which  is  being  worked  out  in  each  individual  life,  or  the 
type  of  human  personality.  The  postulates  as  to  the  nature  of 
the  ethical  end,  and  the  criterion  of  action,  gained  by  self-analysis 
and  observation  are  submitted  to  all  the  forms  of  logical  test  of 
which  the  human  mind  is  capable. 

Briefly  to  recapitulate,  the  subjective-objective  nature  of  eco- 
nomic science  lays  itself  open  to  various  methods  of  treatment, 
(i)   The  objective  factor,  or  the  phenomena  of  supply  may  be 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT,  8l 

treated  mathematically,  inasmuch  as  it  may  be  abstracted  from  the 
subjective  facts,  and  may  be  measured.  (2)  The  relation  be- 
tween the  subjective  and  objective  factors,  being  a  functional 
relation  may  be  expressed  in  the  notation  of  the  differential  cal- 
culus ;  always  bearing  in  mind  the  fact  that  though  the  respective 
factors  are  always  found  in  relation  in  the  world  of  experience, 
they  are  not  commensurable,  and  therefore  the  mathematical  sym- 
bols are  a  short-hand  expression  of  facts  and  relations  which  have 
been  discovered  by  other  methods  ;  not  a  means  toward  further 
knowledge  of  economic  facts.  (3)  The  subjective  factor,  when 
abstracted  from  the  objective  factor,  want  per  se,  may  be  viewed 
as  a  form  of  the  functioning  self,  and  hence  submitted  to  the 
methods  of  self-analysis  and  observation  used  in  the  science  of 
psychology ;  or  (4)  may  be  viewed  teleologically  as  evidence  of 
the  nature  of  the  end.  Hence  the  phenomena  of  want,  as  making 
for  certain  forms  or  types  of  conduct,  comes  under  the  methodo- 
logical treatment  of  such  normative  sciences  as  ethics  or  aesthe- 
tics. 

II.     Concepts  found  in  Modern  Economic  Theory  dealing  with 

the  Suhjective  Factor. 

(i )     Concept  of  a  Scale  of  Suhjective  Wants. 

The  concept  of  a  scale  of  subjective  wants  was  adopted  by 
Jevons  and  Gossen  from  the  concept  of  a  subjective  scale  of 
pleasures  and  pains  present  in  current  utilitarian  ethics,  as  a 
natural  concomitant  to  the  theory  of  the  calculability  of  pleas- 
ures and  pains.  Man  is  impelled  to  action,  said  the  hedonic  phil- 
osophers and  the  formulators  of  economic  theory,  by  a  desire  to 
attain  the  greatest  hedonic  maxima.  To  attain  this  he  must  cal- 
culate pleasure  and  pain  to  avoid  attaining  a  quantum  made  up  of 
lower  or  weak  pleasures,  or  even  containing  some  of  the  less  pain- 
ful pains.  In  the  loose  terminology  of  the  Utilitarians,  some 
pleasures  were  "higher"  than  others,  which  meant,  indiscrimi- 
nately, more  intense,  more  extensive,  more  desirable  or  more 
admirable.  Pleasure  and  pain  according  to  Bentham  and  Mill 
were  considered  as  being  capable  of  being  arranged  in  a  scale. 
The  calculus  of  pleasure  and  pain,  was  considered  as  a  method 


82  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

of  valuing  pleasurable  and  painful  sensation,  in  the  light  of  such 
a  scale,  with  a  view  of  attaining  the  greatest  possible  amount  of 
pleasurable  experience  in  a  life-time.  In  the  hands  of  the  econ- 
omists this  concept  fitted  in  with  a  growing  recognition  of  the 
Subjective  Factor  in  economic  phenomena,  and  finds  its  economic 
concomitant  as  the  concept  of  a  subjective  scale  of  wants. 

It  was  early  observed  that  human  wants  in  the  process  of  satis- 
faction follow  each  other  in  certain  orders ;  physical  wants  appear- 
ing before  intellectual  wants  for  example,  wants  for  the  neces- 
sities of  life  must  be  supplied  to  a  certain  degree,  before  the  com- 
forts or  luxuries  may  be  enjoyed.  Such  a  concept  of  order  in 
appearance  of  wants  underlies  Senior's  Law  of  Variety:  "That 
the  necessities  of  life  are  so  few  and  so  simple  that  a  man  is  soon 
satisfied  in  regard  to  them,  and  then  desires  to  extend  his  range  of 
enjoyment."  Banfield  states  the  concept  much  more  precisely 
when  he  formulated  his  Law  of  the  Scale  of  Wants.^^  Both 
statements  bear  the  utilitarian  trade-mark  of  calculability  of 
pleasure,  and  the  determination  of  the  direction  of  desire  by  the 
"thing-in-itself,"  or  materialism.  Man  in  the  one  case  "extends 
the  range  of  his  enjoyments,"  to  obtain  a  hedonic  maximum.  In 
the  other  case,  the  satisfaction  of  a  want  creates  a  higher  desire — 
the  implication  being  that  the  self  remains  passive.  Jevons 
strikes  a  much  profounder  note  when  he  criticises  Banfield's 
Law  of  the  Subordination  of  Wants,  and  points  out  that  the 
satisfaction  of  the  lower  want  does  not  create  the  higher  want, 
"but  merely  permits  the  higher  one  to  manifest  itself. "^°  And 
this  concept  of  a  scale  of  wants  as  formulated  by  Jevons  under- 
lies not  only  his  theory  of  the  subjective  element  in  valuation 
(The  application  of  the  Final  Utility  to  the  Total),  but  is  the 
basic  idea  of  the  whole  "Grenz-nutzen"  Theory  of  the  Austrian 
School.  Briefly  stated,  the  concept  is  as  follows:  The  wants 
of  an  individual  are  arranged  in  a  certain  order,  which  we  may 
term  "higher  and  lower"  according  to  a  criterion  to  be  determined 
later ;  wants  appearing  in  groups  of  individuals  of  like  status  and 
environment  seem  to  appear  also  in  certain  sequences;  the  order 

"Jevons,  "Theory  of  Political  Economy,"  p.  40. 
^"1.  c,  p.  54- 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  83 

of  these  scales  or  sequences  is  such  that  the  satisfaction  of  every 
lower  want  permits  a  higher  one  to  manifest  itself.  Using  the 
concepts  "more  or  less  itense"  in  place  of  "higher  and  lower," 
the  satisfaction  of  a  more  intense  want,  permits  a  less  intense 
want  to  manifest  itself. 

In  view  of  this  concept  of  a  subjective  scale  many  interesting 
investigations  have  been  made,  both  analytical  and  statistical  as 
to  the  arrangement  and  constitution  of  such  scales  of  wants 
individual  and  social,  and  with  corresponding  lists  of  com- 
modities. Jennings-^  classified  all  commodities  as  primary  and 
secondary  as  they  correspond  to  primary  and  secondary  sensa- 
tions. Senior^-  divides  goods  into  necessities,  comforts  and 
luxuries.  Pantaleoni"^  has  followed  Jennings'  distinction  between 
primary  and  secondary  wants  and  allied  it  to  Gossen's  laws  of 
"Repeated  and  Protracted  Enjoyment,"  and  the  laws  of  the  He- 
donic  Maxima.  His  tentative  formulation  of  the  law  of  the 
elasticity  of  wants  is  as  follows :  Given  an  open  market  and  such 
economic  conditions  as  to  render  possible  an  Increase  in  the 
demand  for  commodities,  we  shall  have  an  "expansion  of  wants 
according  to  a  determinate  order."  Supposing  however  a  diminu- 
tion of  the  means  of  payment,  there  will  be  a  "compression  of 
wants,  or  a  curtailment  of  their  satisfaction,  according  to  a  deter- 
minate order,  differing  from  the  previous  one."  This  positive  and 
negative  expansion  he  calls  the  Empiric  Scale  o-f  Positive  and 
Negative  Elasticity  of  wants,  and  he  gives  interesting  examples 
taken  from  working  men's  budgets  of  the  order  in  which  demand 
for  commodities  expands. 

But  for  our  purpose  it  is  irrelevant  to  note  the  many  applica- 
tions which  have  been  made  of  this  concept  of  an  empiric  sub- 
jective scale,  or  to  criticise  the  many  foreign  elements  which  have 
often  entered  in  the  descriptions  of  these  scales.  Being  a  transi- 
tional step,   from   a  naturalistic  to  an   idealistic  hypothesis,  the 

""Natural   Elements  of   Political   Economy."     Pub. :     Longman,   Brown 
&  Green,  London,  1855.     Richard  Jennings.     (Note  page  reference.) 

"Senior,   "Political   Economy."     Charles   Griffin   &   Co.,   London,    1872. 
Fol.  p.  28. 

"'Pantaleoni,  "Pure  Economics,"  p.  58. 


84  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

treatment  of  this  concept  has  often  suffered  from  the  confused 
terminology  and  hazy  definition  of  such  mixed  concepts.  But  it 
is  important,  in  Ught  of  the  development  toward  an  idealistic 
conception,  which  we  have  been  tracing,  to  point  out  two  char- 
acteristics. 

~  The  subjective  scale  is  regarded  as  empiric.  It  is  a  given 
order  in  the  appearance  of  wants  which  in  the  course  of  experi- 
ence becomes  evident.  It  cannot  be  calculated  and  arranged,  but 
is  the  ground  for  the  calculation  and  arrangement  of  disponible 
goods  and  powers.  One  cannot  say,  "I  arrange  my  desires  and 
wants  so  that  after  the  satisfaction  of  my  physical  demands  for 
food,  warmth  and  sleep,  I  am  in  a  condition  to  satisfy  my  intel- 
lectual wants  for  books."  It  is  simply  a  matter  of  fact,  as  much 
as  the  sequence  of  the  seasons,  that  the  satisfaction  of  physical 
wants  in  a  certain  order,  and  to  a  certain  degree,  are  the  necessary 
condition  of  the  appearance  in  consciousness  of  the  intellectual 
and  spiritual  wants.  Only  when  the  physical,  or  better,  vital 
wants  are  in  a  measure  satisfied  can  the  intellectual  and  spiritual 
wants  become  imperative.  When  Pantaleoni  speaks  of  the 
empiric  scale  of  wants  of  the  positive  and  negative  elasticity  of 
wants,  he  means  wants  in  this  aspect,  as  fixed  in  the  individual 
scale  in  a  characteristic  sequence. 

This  leads  us  directly  to  note  the  second  point.  The  ar- 
rangement of  wants  in  a  scale  is  individual.  We  may  indeed 
examine  numbers  of  "workingmen's  budgets,"  arrange  the  results 
statistically,  and  calculate  the  sequence  in  the  appearance  of  wants 
in  the  "average  man."  We  may  find,  as  Pantaleoni  did,  that 
wants  for  food  expand  through  the  various  income  classes  as  fol- 
lows :  "Salt,  grain,  vegetables,  fruit,  fine  vegetables,  meat,  dairy- 
products,  eggs,  salt  meat,  fish,  liquor,  groceries,  and  tobacco," 
and  that  in  reducing  incomes  commodities  are  economised,  in  the 
following  order :  meat,  vegetables,  groceries,  sugar,  coffee,  liquor, 
tobacco,  and  salt.  But  although  under  certain  wide  limitations  the 
order  of  wants  may  not  vary  for  masses  of  men,  considering  the 
actual  arrangement  of  the  empiric  scales,  they  do  vary  with  every 
individual  in  the  world.  Their  characteristic  arrangement  is 
what  we  call  "personality."     For  our  theory  the  "average  man" 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  85 

does  not  exist  as  the  "economic  man"  does  not  exist.  The  scale 
of  wants  in  every  case  is  the  index  to  the  individual  char- 
acter. In  case  of  absolute  limitation  of  supply,  most  people 
may  feel  wants  for  the  preservation  of  life  more  urgently  than 
for  the  comforts  or  luxuries;  and  organic  and  physical  desires 
may  appear  in  time  before  social,  intellectual  and  esthetic  ones. 
But  such  categories  are  tendencies,  rather  than  laws;  the  con- 
venient classification,  not  the  ''necessary  postulate."  The  person- 
alities that  we  call  great,  in  general,  have  intellectual,  social  and 
spiritual  wants  higher  in  the  scale  than  the  desires  for  the  com- 
forts and  luxuries  of  life.  The  "hero  and  the  martyr"  of  John 
Stuart  Mill,  attribute  a  much  higher  value  to  an  ideal  than  to  the 
preservation  of  life.  It  is  not  even  considered  a  heroic  char- 
acteristic to  find  in  many  individual  scales,  the  want  for  books, 
or  music  or  art  coming  before  most  physical  satisfactions.  No 
one  can  read  Knut  Hamsen's  terrible  analyses  of  the  experience  of 
"Hunger"  without  realising  that  in  the  really  creative  and  artistic 
temperament,  pencil  and  paper,  and  not  bread  and  butter  may  be 
the  sine  qua  non  of  existence.  The  order  and  arrangement  of 
the  wants  in  the  subjective  empiric  scale  indicates  the  nature  of 
the  man.  They  make  for  "personality"  and  "individuality"  as 
opposed  to  the  mechanical  collection  of  attributes  which  has  so 
long  been  ticketed  as  the  "economic  man." 

(2)     The  Concept  of  Total  Utility. 

In  the  foregoing  paragraph  we  have  made  use  of  the  phrases 
"appear  first  in  time"  and  "higher  in  the  scale"  to  indicate  the 
place  of  a  want  in  a  determined  order.  The  distinction  in  thought 
between  these  expressions  gives  us  a  clue  to  the  distinction 
between  the  concept  of  an  empiric  scale  of  wants,  and  the 
fundamental  concept  of  modern  economic  theory  that  of  Total 
Utility.  Looking  at  the  scale  empirically,  wants  are  seen  to 
emerge  during  the  course  of  human  life  from  the  cloudy  sub- 
conscious "threshold"  into  the  clear  light  of  conscious  desire. 
From  an  infant's  instinctive  desire  for  food,  to  a  man's  individual 
preference  for  a  beef-steak  rather  than  a  lamb-chop,  lies  a  long 
continuous   development    from   instinctive   seeking   to   conscious 


86  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

want.  During  any  given  time  in  the  developing  individual,  wants 
for  objects  emerge  in  consciousness,  and  may  be  ranged  accord- 
ing to  their  intensity;  that  is  may  be  put  before  or  after  one 
another  according  as  they  are  more  or  less  intensely  desired ;  or 
in  the  case  of  curtailment  of  satisfaction,  in  the  order  in  which 
they  would  be  foregone.  This  is  again  the  point  of  view  under- 
lying Pantaleoni's  Empiric  Positive  and  Negative  Scales,  and 
may  be  called  in  general  the  concept  of  the  Empiric  Scale  of 
Want. 

But  the  concept  of  Total  Utility,  though  it  includes  the  con- 
tents of  the  Empiric  Scale,  is  not  limited  to  that  concept.  Our 
concept  of  our  total  utility  not  only  includes  the  idea  of  the 
satisfaction  of  our  presently  felt  wants,  but  goes  beyond  our  pres- 
ently felt  wants,  to  include  wants  which  at  present  may  be 
submerged  or  in  abeyance,  and  looks  forward  to  wants  which 
are  at  present  but  dimly  felt,  and  even  to  conjectural  wants,  which 
we  have  never  personally  felt  as  urgent,  but  which  we  know  we 
should  feel,  were  our  economic  position  more  favorable.  It 
takes  into  account  the  exercise  of  faculties,  but  partially  devel- 
oped, and  the  expansion  of  capacities  which  as  yet  may  be  only 
potential.  Total  Utility  is  our  idea  of  well-being  not  as  static 
persons  bounded  by  an  empiric  scale,  but  as  developable  person- 
alities with  constantly  new  wants  pushing  the  known  diameter 
of  experience  farther  into  the,  as  yet,  unknown  world  of  possible 
economic  phenomena. 

Total  Utility,  in  other  words,  is  an  ideal  of  self  as  a  devel- 
oped and  completed  person.  It  exists  in  the  will  and  determines 
the  direction  of  instinctive  and  semi-instinctive  desire,  before  it 
becomes  explicit  in  consciousness.  However  hazy  and  nebulous 
it  is  in  the  beginning  of  conscious  life,  it  becomes  concrete  in 
that  partial  satisfaction  of  wants,  and  endless  striving  after  the 
"next  thing," — which  v/e  call  living.  It  is  made  known  to  us, 
moreover,  by  our  observation  of  our  own  acts  of  choice  and 
decision.  Like  the  ethical  ideal  of  virtue,  and  the  aesthetic  idea 
of  beauty,  it  is  always  a  step  ahead  of  our  actual  accomplishment 
(in  this  case,  our  economic  status)  for  it  is  always  the  actual 
accomplishment  which  elevates  us  to  see  the  next  turning;  the 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  87 

foot-hill  which  brings  to  view  the  nearer  range.  The  Empiric 
Scale  of  wants,  either  of  an  individual  or  of  a  society  measures 
the  actual  demand  upon  the  world  at  any  given  time.  The  ideal 
of  Total  Utility  of  an  individual,  or  the  ideal  of  Total  Social 
Utility  of  a  community  indicates  the  direction  in  which  individual 
and  social  economic  life  will  proceed.  It  is  the  reverse  side  of 
the  biblical  maxim  "Where  the  heart  is  there  is  the  treasure  also." 

The  concept  of  Total  Utility  as  the  ideal  of  human  well-being, 
is  the  basis  of  all  purposive  economic  action,  as  the  ethical  ideal 
of  virtue  is  of  all  purposive  personal  conduct.  If  the  "economic 
man"  had  been  moved  to  attain  his  greatest  pleasure  through  the 
satisfaction  of  his  known  wants  with  the  least  exertion;  if  he 
had  been  determined  to  action  through  the  more  or  less  intense 
wants  in  his  empiric  scale,  in  the  case  of  being  unfavorably  placed 
in  the  struggle  for  existence,  it  would  have  been  "economic" 
for  him  to  have  secured  his  "greatest  pleasure"  through  the 
dreams  of  an  opium  pipe  thus  maximising  pleasurable  sensation, 
and  minimising  painful  exertion.  But  the  really  "economic  man" 
moves  to  accomplish  something  beyond  the  range  of  his  present 
demands  upon  life;  he  struggles  to  put  himself  in  an  economic 
position  where  faculties  which  he  feels  within  himself,  but  hardly 
defines,  may  have  fuller  play.  He  seeks  to  rearrange  external 
goods  so  that  they  may  be  more  advantageous  to  his  growing 
demands.  He  harnesses  nature  that  it  may  do  for  him  what  he 
once  had  to  do  for  himself  by  physical  labour,  and  thus  gives 
his  higher  faculties  freer  scope.  He  goes  through  long,  tedious, 
laborious  processes,  that  in  the  end,  his  relation  to  the  world  of 
limited  supply  may  be  more  advantageous  and  afiford  the  play  of 
more  faculties.  Moreover,  he  educates  his  children  that  they 
may  be  as  well  equipped  as  possible  in  the  struggle  for  existence, 
which  means  in  the  highest  sense,  the  struggle  for  complete  per- 
sonality. It  is  the  desire  for  the  fullest  self-expression,  not  the 
desire  for  pleasurable  sensation  which  has  built  up  industrial 
systems  and  subdued  the  physical  world. 

It  is  in  the  light  of  such  an  ideal  of  a  completely  developed 
human  personality  that  we  may  apply  the  terms  "higher"  and 
"lower"   to  human   wants.     In   the   empiric   scale   they   emerge 


88  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

"before"  and  "after,"  as  "more"  or  "less  intense."  It  is  only  in 
view  of  an  ideal  which  gives  us  a  standard  of  judgment  that  we 
may  attach  to  them  value ;  and  set  them  in  order  as  "higher"  and 
"lower,"  more  or  less  desirable.  It  is  no  longer  an  empiric 
arrangement  appearing  as  the  characteristic  of  our  human  nature, 
but  as  the  normative  self  in  the  character  of  a  functioning  agent, 
which  judges,  orders  and  arranges,  as  it  applies  a  standard  given 
immediately  to  the  presented  facts  of  supply. 

It  is  the  part  of  a  free  agent,  therefore,  not  of  a  naturalistic 
creature  determined  in  his  action  by  an  expected  surplus  of 
pleasure  and  pain  which  economises  limited  supply  to  cover  the 
greatest  quantum  of  demand,  which  induces  abstinence  from 
present  consumption,  that  a  more  advantageous  future  condition 
may  afford  scope  of  action  to  more  powers  and  faculties ;  and 
which  plans  the  whole  economic  conquest  over  nature  so  that  the 
man  no  longer  terrorised  by  natural  powers  may  master  them, 
and  thus  realise  himself  more  completely.  The  application  of 
the  Ideal  of  Total  Utility  to  the  presented  economic  phenomena, 
brings  us  to  consider  the  next  important  concept  found  in  analys- 
ing the  subjective  factor;  the  concept  of  Marginal  Utility,  and  its 
relation  to  the  economic  judgment. 

(3)     Marginal  Utility  and  the  Economic  Jndgmcnt. 

The  concept  of  Total  Utility,  as  an  ideal  of  well-being  present 
in  consciousness  gives  us  a  standard  of  value.  In  order  to 
apply  the  standard  of  value  to  the  world  of  measurable  supply 
to  determine  its  economic  significance  for  us  in  practical  life,  we 
must  have  some  Measure  of  Value;  some  unit  which  will  rate 
the  relative  worth  of  an  increment  to  a  stock  of  goods ;  and  place 
the  increment  or  stock  relative  to  our  Total  Utility.  This  measure 
of  value  Jevons  demonstrated  to  be  the  Final  or  Marginal 
Utility.  It  is  not  the  complete  satisfaction  of  the  more  urgent 
want  in  the  Empiric  Scale,  which  determines  the  extent  of  the 
scale.  Such  an  act  would  be  in  its  way  absolute,  would  have  no 
reference  to  the  satisfaction  of  other  wants,  hence  could  but 
determine  their  relative  value  in  the  total.  It  is  the  least  urgent 
want  satisfied,  the  last  in  a  series  of  wants  to  receive  considera- 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  89 

tion  that  determines  the  relative  importance  of  the  rest.  Again, 
it  is  not  that  increment  of  a  stock  of  goods  which  yields  the  first 
or  most  intense  satisfaction  which  determines  the  value  of  the 
stock,  but  the  good  whose  use  is  first  foregone  in  case  of  a  cur- 
tailment of  the  extent  of  consumption.  It  is  the  Marginal 
Utility  not  the  Primal  Utility  which  measures  Value. 

The  recognition  of  this  marginal  determining  element  in  eco- 
nomic valuation  was  the  "Copernican  Revolution"  in  economic 
thinking  that  established  once  for  all  the  subjective-objective 
nature  of  economic  science.  It  also  established  the  essentially 
ideal  nature  of  the  concept  of  Total  Utility,  the  economic  stand- 
ard of  value.  We  shall  return  to  this  point  in  our  discussion 
of  the  nature  of  the  economic  judgment.  But  we  must  point 
out  as  preface  to  such  a  study  certain  characteristics  of  the 
marginal  concept. 

(i)     The  Concept  of  the  Marginal  Want. 

There  are  two  possible  aspects  under  which  we  may  study  the 
concept  of  marginal  utility :  under  the  condition  of  unlimited  and 
limited  supply.  Consideration  of  the  first  case  of  unlimited  sup- 
ply brings  us  to  the  concept  of  the  determining  factor  of  an  act 
of  valuation  as  the  marginal  want.^*     Suppose  a  scale  of  sub- 

"This  hypothesis  may  be  diagrammatically  expressed  as  Menger's  "Be- 
diirfnis  Scala,"  which  is  the  psychological  ground  for  the  "Grenznutzen- 
Gesetz"  of  the  Austrian  school.  It  rests  on  Gossen's  laws  of  the  decreased 
satisfaction  of  protracted  enjoyment  and  of  the  hedonic  maxima.  It  sup- 
poses wants  to  be  capable  -of  such  arrangement  that  the  most  urgent  want 
(I)  may  be  satisfied  with  ten  increments  of  supply,  the  next  urgent  (11) 
with  nine,  etc. 

X 


1 

II 

III 

IV 

v 

VI 

VII 

VIII 

IX 

10 

9 
8 

9 
8 

8 

7 
6 

7 
6 

7 
6 

7 
6 

6 

5 

5 

5 

5 

5 

5 

4 

4 

4 

4 

4 

4 

4 

3 

?, 

3 

3 

3 

3 

3 

3 

2 

2 

2 

2 

2 

2 

2 

2 

2 

I 

I 

I 

I 

I 

I 

I 

I 

I 

QO  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

jective  wants  such  that  the  intensity  of  the  satisfaction  of  each 
want  decreases  with  the  consumption  of  each  increment  of  com- 
modity which  in  this  case  is  considered  as  unlimited.  If  want 
A  is  completely  satisfied  with  ten  increments  of  commodity,  and 
want  B  with  nine,  want  C  with  eight,  etc.,  clearly  there  is  a 
given  point  in  the  satisfaction  of  each  want  when  it  will  yield  a 
higher  degree  of  satisfaction  to  cease  consumption  along  the  line 
(A)  yielding  an  increasingly  lower  return  in  satisfaction,  and  to 
turn  to  the  satisfaction  of  a  want  (B)  yielding  a  relatively  higher 
rate  of  satisfaction.  That  is,  in  the  satisfaction  of  each  one  in  the 
scale  there  is  a  point  short  of  satiation,  beyond  which  it  is 
uneconomic  to  proceed,  as  increased  consumption  brings  an 
increasingly  small  return  relative  to  the  Total  Utility.  The  want 
which  marks  the  boundary  between  the  greatest  available  return 
in  satisfaction,  and  the  next  greatest  is  the  marginal  want.  Thus 
abstracted  from  limited  supply,  the  value-determining  factor  lies 
in  the  nature  of  human  wants,  which  are  quantitatively  satiable, 
and  may  in  each  separate  case,  be  turned  from  desire  to  loathing 
by  continuing  to  consume  successive  increments  of  the  same  good 
to  the  point  of  satiation  and  beyond ;  but  which  are  qualitatively 
insatiable,  there  being  no  limit  this  side  of  death  to  the  capacity 
for  variety  in  economic  experience.  The  marginal  point  in  the 
satisfaction  of  any  individual  want,  or  the  marginal  want  in  our 
individual  scales  mark  the  points  where  economic  or  uneconomic 
conduct  is  registered.  It  fixes  the  value  of  each  want  in  our 
scale,  and  measures  for  us  our  Total  Utility. 

(ii)     The  Concept  of  the  Marginal  Good. 

Using  the  same  concept  of  a  scale  of  wants,  but  supposing 
a  limited  supply  of  goods,  the  last  increment  of  goods  consumed, 
or  the  least  use  to  which  an  increment  of  goods  may  profitably 
be  turned  measures  the  value  of  the  total  available  stock  of  such 
goods.  It  is  the  marginal  good,  and  may  be  used  as  the  objective 
measure  of  value  for  the  stock.  The  classic  examples  of  the 
Marginal  Good  may  be  multiplied  without  number.^^     Crusoe  in 

^°These  are  examples  used  by  Bohm-Bawerk  in  his  exposition  of  the 
Theory  of  Marginal  Utility,  and  by  Smart  in  his  "Introduction  to  the 
Theory  of  Marginal  Utility." 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  91 

his  island  with  corn  for  food,  fodder  and  seed  for  feeding  his 
pet  animals ;  the  shipwrecked  sailor  with  bread  and  water  to  be 
divided  between  himself,  his  comrade  and  his  dog.  In  these 
cases  the  portion  of  corn,  which  in  case  of  stress  Crusoe  withholds 
from  the  pet-animals,  or  the  bread  which,  when  rescue  is  deferred, 
the  sailor  refuses  to  share  with  his  dog;  in  other  words,  the  least 
urgent  use  to  which  an  increment  of  a  limited  stock  of  commodity- 
may  be  put,  measures  the  value  of  the  whole.  It  is  the  marginal 
good. 

It  is  to  be  noted  that  these  two  elements  in  the  concept  of 
marginal  utility:  the  marginal  want  and  the  marginal  good,  are 
always  perceived  together  but  their  relation  is  functional,  not 
causal.  The  marginal  want  does  not  cause  the  marginal  good, 
or  vice  versa.  The  marginal  line  is  drawn  where  these  two 
coincide.  It  is  almost  tautological  to  assert  that  the  least  valu- 
able increment  in  the  supply  of  goods  supplies  the  least  urgent 
demand  in  a  scale  of  wants.  It  is  but  another  expression  of  the 
subjective-objective  nature  of  economic  concepts. 

In  the  brief  survey  of  the  marginal  concept,  we  have  made  no 
attempt  to  analyse  it,  or  indicate  its  manifold  application  to  all 
branches  of  economic  thinking.  The  marginal,  and  its  supple- 
mentary concept,  the  differential  are  the  tools  which  modem 
economists  use  in  dealing  with  all  problems  in  connection  with 
interest,  rent,  wages,  and  indeed  with  all  branches  of  economic 
phenomena.  The  enumeration  of  the  uses  to  which  these  con- 
cepts have  been  put  since  the  days  of  Ricardo  would  fill  volumes. 
But  our  chief  interest  lies  in  noting  the  ideal  nature  of  the 
marginal  concept,  and  its  relation  to  the  Total  Utility  concept,  or 
standard  of  value.  To  estimate  clearly  the  relation  between 
the  two,  we  must  examine  the  nature  of  the  valuing  faculty ;  the 
faculty  that  applies  the  standard  to  the  concrete  good,  that  deter- 
mines the  relative  weight  of  the  want  in  the  scale,  in  other  words, 
economic  judgment. 

(iii)     The  Economic  Judgment. 

In  our  account  of  the  concept  of  Total  and  Marginal  Utility, 
we  have  assembled  the  factors  present  in  every  act  of  valuation. 


92  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

We  have  immediately  given  in  consciousness  an  ideal  of  ourself 
as  satisfied  or  completed;  from  the  circumstance  of  limited  sup- 
ply we  have  the  presence  of  the  marginal  good  in  functional 
relation  with  the  marginal  want.  It  now  remains  to  investigate 
the  nature  of  the  act  of  valuation  itself.  It  is  obviously  not  a 
simple  act  in  view  of  the  number  of  factors  which  must  be  taken 
into  account ;  and  therefore  lends  itself  to  no  simple  expression. 
If  the  act  of  valuation  were  accompanied  by  a  running  comment 
from  the  introspecting  self,  it  would  amount  to  something  like 
this.  "With  regard  to  my  concept  of  total  well-being,  and  in 
the  face  of  limited  supply,  I  value  A  higher  than  B  as  making 
for  a  more  complete  realisation  of  myself  as  satisfied;  that  is, 
I  choose  A  rather  than  B."  The  so-called  economic  judgment  of 
value  is  not  a  judgment  in  the  intellectual  sense,  it  is  an  act  of 
will}^  It  can  only  exist  wherever  there  is  a  subjective  scale  of 
human  wants,  and  successive  degrees  in  the  intensity  of  desire 
of  each  want.  It  can,  again,  only  exist  where  there  is  a  stock 
of  goods,  with  separable  increments.  A  desire  however  intense, 
existing  alone  (if  such  can  be  imagined)  and  the  presence  of  one 
good  capable  of  completely  satisfying  that  desire,  would  give 
rise  to  the  phenomena  of  demand  and  supply,  consumption,  satis- 
faction, but  never  to  value.  The  circumstances  of  value  must 
be  the  presence  of  various  increments  of  supply,  relative  to  vari- 
ous human  wants.  I  must  choose  A,  or  B  relative  to  my  desire 
A'  or  B'.  The  economic  judgment,  therefore,  is  a  volitional 
judgment.  It  is  a  choice  between  the  marginal  utility,  and  the 
utility  regarded  as  next  in  importance.  The  dialectic  of  the 
economic  judgment  must  therefore  be  a  dialectic  of  choice." 

'°No  account  has  been  taken  in  this  paper  of  the  recent  logical  and 
psychological  studies  in  the  theory  of  vaUie  by  certain  Austrian  and 
German  scholars,  one  of  the  most  important  phases  of  whose  work  has 
been  an  enquiry  into  the  nature  of  the  economic  judgment.  The  reason 
for  this  omission  is  the  fact  that  the  development  in  ethical  and  economic 
theory  traced  in  this  essay  has  been  restricted  to  the  English  schools. 

"I  am  indebted  for  this  expression  to  a  suggestion  of  Mr.  Bernard 
Bosanquet  in  an  article  in  "Mind,"  new  series,  Vol.  XII,  on  "Hedonism 
among  Idealists."     In  discussing  the    possibility  of  a  hedonic  computation 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  93 

Looking  at  other  forms  of  judgment  for  a  moment  to  bring 
out  more  clearly  the  distinguishing  characteristics  of  the  eco- 
nomic judgment,  we  find  that  though  the  general  type  is  similar, 
i.  e.,  the  application  of  a  standard  or  criterion  to  a  given  phe- 
nomena, by  means  of  a  unifying  act  of  will,  the  circumstances 
are  characteristically  different.  In  the  intellectual  judgment,  or 
judgment  of  truth,  as  for  instance  when  I  judge  "This  is  a 
book,"  I  judge  the  object  presented  in  experience  to  correspond 
to  my  idea  of  it.  The  self  is  active,  in  that  it  unifies  in  a  single 
act  the  object  and  the  idea.  The  standard  of  truth,  consistency 
or  coherency,  exists  in  consciousness,  and  when  I  judge  "some- 
thing is,"  I  am,  as  a  functioning  self,  unifying  appearance  with 
reality. 

This  intellectual  standard  of  truth  as  consistency,  we  must 
postulate  to  be  the  intellectual  standard  of  all  rational  beings. 
Were  it  otherwise,  there  would  be  no  possibility  of  communica- 
tion. One  man's  "fish"  might  not  only  be  another  man's 
"poison,"  but  his  "yes"  might  be  another's  "no,"  "perhaps"  or 
"tomorrow."  The  ethical  judgment  of  right  is  not  only  less 
universal,  and  more  individual  than  the  intellectual  judgment  of 
truth,  but  it  is  more  concrete  and  full  of  content.  "In  the  light 
of  my  ideal  of  myself  as  infinitely  perfectable  or  realisable,  I 
judge  this  action  to  be  right  or  wrong."  This  is  an  ethical 
judgment  of  worth,  in  which  the  ideal  of  the  self  as  realised,  or 
virtue,  is  applied  to  a  concrete  personal  action  to  determine  its 
ethical  value.  The  criterion  in  this  case  is  harmony  with  the 
ideal. 

Thus  the  ethical  judgment  deals  directly  with  concrete  personal 
activity,  brought  into  relation  with  an  ideal  of  conduct,  which 
to  the  degree  in  which  it  is  unrealised  in  character,  is  superper- 

of  pleasure-pain  he  says :  "The  laws  of  the  combination,  though  certainly 
not  irrational,  are  not  yet  arithmetical.  They  are  the  laws  of  the  logic  of 
desire,  by  which  its  objects  include,  modify,  and  reinforce  or  supplant 
each  other,  and  they  deal  in  every  case  with  the  growth  of  an  individual, 
concrete  Whole,  perpetually  modifying  itself.  .  .  .  Our  desires  have 
a  dialectic  of  their  own."    P.  218. 


94  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

sonal  or  spiritual.  The  economic  judgment  takes  the  next  step 
in  concreteness,  and  brings  the  human  personaHty  in  relation  to 
the  objective  world  of  limited  supply.  "In  the  light  of  myself 
as  satisfied,  (my  Total  Utility,)  I  judge  that  A  makes  more 
efifectively  for  my  well  being  than  B."  More  concisely  put  "I 
choose  A  for  myself  rather  than  B." 

But  from  the  organisation  of  society,  and  the  complications  of 
economic  life,  we  make  many  so-called  economic  judgments  which 
never  directly  afifect  our  one  subject  scales  of  wants;  though  we 
make  such  judgments  with  regard  to  our  subjective  scales.     That 
is;   in  making  our  world   comprehensible,   and   in  ordering  the 
economic  chaos  about  us,  we  are  obliged  to  fit  many  objects  into 
a  scale  of  commodities,  which  we  are  never  able  to  command  for 
our  own  consumption.     The  man  with  a  salary  of  a  thousand  a 
year  is  never  called  upon  actually  to  choose  between  a  steam 
yacht  and  a  four-in-hand  coach.     Nevertheless  the  steam  yacht 
and  the  four-in-hand  coach  have  their  places  in  a  scale  of  com- 
modities which  he  arranges  to  fit  the  demands  of  his  nature; 
though  they  may  never  approach  the  marginal  point  of  disponible 
goods,   and  so  never  become  objects   of  choice.     The  judging 
process  is   the   same  whether  we  make  a   real  or  hypothetical 
choice.     It  is  only  a  question  of  extent  of  control  over  goods, 
whether  I  say,  "I  choose  the  new  book  rather  than  the  theatre 
ticket,"  which  means   I  place  the  book  higher  in  the  scale  of 
disponible  goods,  as  ministering  immediately  to  a  higher  or  more 
urgent  want,  or  "I  choose  the  steam  yacht  rather  than  the  four-in- 
hand    coach."      In    every    self-conscious    person,    the    range    of 
tabulated  desire  extends  far  beyond  the  range  of  disponible  goods. 
Even  with  those  persons  whose  actual  incomes  more  than  cover 
their  personal  outlay,  the  millionaires  and  the  plutocrat,  the  eco- 
nomic nature  of  their  judgments  of  worth  does  not  change.    The 
category  of  "disponible  goods"  in  such  cases  increases  with  the 
free  development  of  variety  in  wants  to  include  heightened  per- 
sonal power,  artistic  or  creative  or  organising  ability,  influence, 
prestige,  political  power,  control  over  men,  disinterested  benevo- 
lence, etc.  _ 


^ 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  95 

Then  again  we  make  many  economic  judgments  not  directly 
with  respect  to  our  own  Total  Utility,  but  with  regard  to  society 
as  a  whole.  The  process  is  again  the  same,  only  the  ideal  of 
well-being,  which  we  apply  as  a  criterion  of  economic  value  is 
the  well-being  of  society  as  a  whole,  or  Total  Social  Utility. 
In  the  light  of  such  an  ideal  we  should  choose  A  rather  than  B, 
or  place  A  higher  than  B  in  a  scale  of  Social  Utilities. 

Briefly  to  recapitulate  the  points  thus  indicated :  In  the  com- 
plicated operation  making  up  the  so-called  economic  judgment  of 
value  there  is  present  in  our  consciousness  (a)  our  ideal  of 
Total  Economic  Utility,  or  our  concept  of  ourselves  as  satisfied 
and  completed,  which  concept  is  analytically  resolvable  into  a 
subjective  scale  of  wants  in  order  of  urgency,  or  the  Empiric 
Scale,  and  as  an  ordered  scale  ascending  to  better  and  worse 
which  we  may  call  an  Ideal  Scale.  There  is  given  in  experience 
(b)  the  presence  of  alternate  goods,  only  those  which  affect  our 
choice  however  are  the  goods  about  the  margin :  that  is,  the  goods 
coming  within  the  range  of  our  possible  disposition.  The  sub- 
jective and  objective  elements  are  united  (c)  by  the  active  func- 
tioning of  the  will  in  an  act  of  choice. 

Variants   in   the   Economic  Judgment. 

The  immediate  nature  of  the  ethical  judgment  carries  with  it 
a  certain  element  of  apodictic  certainty.  The  ideal  of  virtue 
present  in  our  consciousness  is  immediately  applied  in  judgments 
of  conduct,  and  we  feel  harmony  and  discord  the  more  acutely 
as  our  ideal  is  revealed  to  us ;  in  common  parlance,  as  our  "con- 
science is  sensitive."  The  very  nature  of  the  economic  judg- 
ment gives  more  scope  for  variation.  Of  the  twofold  nature  of 
economic  phenomenon,  one  element  is  harnessed  to  the  world 
of  fact  from  the  circumstance  of  limited  supply,  the  other  is  often 
at  the  mercy  of  the  vagaries  of  human  passion  and  caprice. 

One  important  variable  in  the  factors  determining  the  eco- 
nomic judgment  is  the  varying  strength  of  human  desire.  A 
sudden  strength  of  desire  may  move  the  will  to  make  a  choice 
not  for  the  total  well-being.     Economic  judgments  may  be  made 


96  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

from  passion  and  caprice,  so  that  commodities  rated  as  relatively 
low  in  our  scale  of  commodities  are  elevated  to  an  abnormal 
height.  The  common  experience  in  such  expressions  as  "We 
bought  it  because  we  wanted  it,  though  we  really  knew  better," 
trivial  as  it  may  seem,  indicates  a  type  of  economic  judgment  that 
is  well  known  in  the  industrial  world.  This  arbitrary  action  of 
the  will  is  really  the  basis  of  the  industrial  phenomena  of  Fash- 
ion,— Price.  Caprice  and  ingenuity  fix  upon  one  "style"  after 
another,  elevate  it  to  the  rank  of  "fashion,"  invest  it  with  an 
artificial  value  for  a  season,  and  then  drop  it  for  the  next  der- 
nier cri.  Irrational  as  it  may  seem  the  irregularity  of  this 
variable  element  may  be  calculated,  and  indeed  must  be  calcu- 
lated in  organising  the  industrial  market;  otherwise  the  button- 
makers  would  go  bankrupt  when  buttons  went  "out  of  style," 
and  ribbon-makers  starve,  when  feathers  became  fashionable! 
The  producers  of  "fashion  goods"  count  upon  caprice,  and  the 
universal  tendency  to  imitate  which  makes  the  majority  of  people 
hasten  to  acquire  for  themselves  what  they  consider  for  the  time 
"good  form,"  and  can  estimate  approximately  how  long  these 
temporary  inflations  of  value  will  last. 

Another  source  of  variability  in  the  economic  judgment  is 
intellectual  error.  A  is  not  what  we  conceive  it  to  be;  it  is  in 
reality  B,  C,  or  D.  The  will  may  act  on  a  false  judgment  of 
fact.  Such  errors  arise  from  inexperience,  inadequate  knowledge 
or  a  defective  judgment  as  to  the  nature  of  goods,  and  their 
capacity  for  satisfying  desire.  The  misapplication  of  riches  to 
still  the  demands  of  personality  for  self-expression  which  are 
seen  in  every  capitalistic  society,,  are  examples  of  this  form  of 
error  in  economic  judgment.  The  hollo wness  which  the  roue 
finds  in  the  world  after  misapplying  all  the  goods  of  the  earth, 
is  but  another  form  of  the  dissatisfaction  which  the  parvenu 
finds  in  his  tapestried  drawing-room  which  fails  to  supply  the 
comfort  of  the  old  "back-parlour."  They  have  both  wrongly 
estimated  the  place  of  certain  goods  in  the  scale  of  commodities, 
and  endeavoured  to  supply  want  A  with  good  D,  with  the  usual 
effect  of  a  round  peg  in  a  square  hole. 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  97 

But  the  most  usual  source  of  error  is  an  undeveloped  con- 
sciousness of  the  ideal  of  well-being  or  Total  Utility,  which  comes 
from  lack  of  reflection  and  analysis  as  to  the  trend  of  economic 
acts  and  judgments  of  value.  Many  judgments  are  made  in  daily 
life  without  any  clear  recognition  of  the  end  which  they  are  to 
serve.  In  the  instinctive  and  habitual  actions  which  form  the 
greater  part  of  living,  we  tend  to  express  ourselves ;  and  we  find 
in  the  analysis  of  those  actions  light  as  to  our  essential  natures ; 
they  supply  the  concrete  content  of  the  ideal.  The  hour  of 
reckoning  which  follows  the  moment  of  error,  passion  or  folly, 
often  makes  us  conscious  of  the  half-light  in  which  we  are  con- 
tent to  live,  and  we  excuse  our  deeds  and  half  deliberate  choice 
by  saying  "We  did  not  at  the  time  realise  what  was  our  own 
good." 

III.     The  Distinction  between  the  concepts  of  IDEAL  or 
TOTAL,  as  they  appear  in  the  ethical  and  economic 

Judgment. 

In  bringing  out  the  essential  forms  of  the  economic  judgment, 
we  found  it  necessary  to  compare  it  with  the  ethical  judgment  of 
worth.  A  word  must  be  said  as  to  the  characteristic  differ- 
ences in  the  ethical  and  economic  ideal,  as  the  standard  or  cri- 
terion for  the  respective  judgments.  Both  are  ideals  of  our- 
selves implanted  in  the  will  and  gathering  content  from  the 
experience  of  life.  They  must  be  sharply  distinguished  however 
if  we  are  to  have  any  canon  of  distinction  in  separating  ethical 
and  economical  phenomena,  and  ethical  and  economic  fields  of 
activity. 

The  ethical  total  or  ideal  of  self  is  always  regarded  as  infi- 
nite in  its  capacity  for  development  and  in  its  perfectability, 
though  necessarily  finite  in  its  manifestations  in  character.  We 
make  ethical  judgments  with  respect  to  an  infinite  factor  in  our- 
selves, a  capacity  for  developing  new  wants,  activities  and  powers, 
and  qualitatively  intensifying  our  present  attributes.  "Circum- 
stance"  we  regard  as  the   confining,  limiting  and   determining 


98  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

element.  Were  the  circumstances  favorable,  we  feel  infinite 
possibilities  within  ourselves,  and  the  human  race  for  develop- 
ment. Whether  we  call  this  "immortality  of  the  soul,"  or 
"genius,"  it  is  the  conviction  of  every  reflecting  person,  that  there 
are  capacities  within  him  that  never  have  been,  and  under  the 
circumstances  of  human  life  never  can  be  adequately  realised. 
Thus,  an  action  is  not  only  right  when  it  is  in  harmony  with  one 
present  known  ideal,  but  it  must  not  shut  the  door  to  future  prog- 
ress ;  it  must  not  prevent  the  natural  development  of  new  powers 
and  capacities.  To  deny  education  to  people,  is  not  only  wrong 
in  that  it  denies  the  satisfaction  of  the  legitimate  desire  for  knowl- 
edge, but  because  it  debars  them  from  becoming  the  quality  or 
type  of  persons  which  with  the  development  of  their  potential 
capacities  they  might  otherwise  have  become. 

In  the  light  of  this  infinite  element  in  the  ethical  ideal,  the 
ethical  field  of  activity  is  coincident  with  the  whole  field  of  human 
action,  whether  such  activity  deals  with  matters  of  fact,  which 
may  be  weighed  and  measured  or  with  matters  of  spirit,  which 
may  only  be  valued  by  spiritual  standards.  When  we  act  from  a 
regard  of  ourselves  as  capable  of  infinite  development  and  per- 
fection, we  are  acting  ethically  and  judgments  concerning  such 
actions  are  ethical  judgments. 

But  in  daily  life  many  actions  are  performed  and  many  judg- 
ments are  made  which  bear  no  immediate  reference  to  such  an 
ethical  ideal.  They  may  always  be  made  to  bear  reference  to 
it,  by  pushing  the  judging  criterion  back  one  step  to  include 
cosmic  relations.  But  in  the  ordinary  judgments  of  valuation 
which  make  the  warp  and  woof  of  practical  domestic  and  busi- 
ness life,  the  ideal  of  self  which  we  apply  as  criterion  of  judg- 
ment is  the  economic  ideal  of  Total  Utility.  It  is  the  idea  of  the 
self  as  satisfied,  such  a  state  being  regarded  as  actually  realisable; 
the  condition  of  the  actuality  of  such  a  state  of  satisfaction  being 
the  command  over  certain  scarcity  goods.  In  all  the  human  pro- 
cesses which  we  call  economy,  whether  it  be  domestic  or  social; 
of  purse  or  of  person ;  when  we  endeavour  to  fit  together  the 
fragments  that  we  have,  and  eke  out  the  balance  with  such  sub- 


TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT.  99 

stitutes  as  we  may  invent ;  when  we  stretch  the  supply  we  control 
to  cover  to  the  greatest  extent  our  demand  upon  life,  we  always 
proceed  from  the  ground  that  could  we  control  enough  we  could 
realise  our  Total  Utility.  Failure  to  realise  such  an  ideal  is 
always  regarded  as  a  circumstance  of  goods,  not  a  characteristic 
of  our  economic  ideal.  It  -is  true  there  is  limited  supply,  but 
could  we  control  a  certain  portion  of  it  we  should  "never  want 
anything  more."  It  is  only  when  we  judge  ethically  that  we  can 
say  with  Jevons  that  every  "satisfaction  of  a  lower  want  in  the 
scale  permits  a  higher  one  to  manifest  itself."  The  economic 
total  is  the  self  regarded  as  finite  and  realisable ;  the  economic 
judgment  applies  this  concrete  standard  to  the  phenomena  of 
limited  supply  to  detemiine  a  practical  scale  of  commodities  ;  to 
value  the  goods  of  the  world. 

The  economic  field  of  activity  then,  covers  all  action  which 
relates  a  subjective  scale  of  wants  to  the  world  of  limited  goods. 
It  is  limited  and  finite,  and  presents  endless  alternations  for 
choice.  We  judge  A  over  against  B  when  they  are  not  equally 
disponible ;  we  choose  A  rather  than  B  when  we  cannot  have  both. 

Thus  the  ethical  and  economic  ideals,  as  we  pointed  out  in  the 
introductory  chapter,  cannot  be  regarded  as  separate  or  anti- 
thetical. The  relation  between  them  is  organic,  in  as  much  as 
they  are  both  interpretations  of  the  end  of  life  which  all  human 
beings  seek  to  realise.  In  each  individual  case  they  picture  the 
end  which  the  human  being  more  or  less  consciously  acts  to 
realise.  They  may  be  abstracted  from  one  another  for  the  sake 
of  analysis ;  but  they  may  never  be  really  separated  any  more  than 
the  organs  of  the  body,  which  though  individual  cannot  live 
except  in  organic  connection  with  the  whole.  The  distinction 
really  lies  in  the  point  of  view  of  the  judging  self.  When  we 
regard  the  self  in  its  cosmic  relations,  as  an  entity  with 
infinitely  realisable  and  perfectable  attributes,  and  apply  such 
an  ideal  to  conduct,  thus  submitting  the  facts  of  life  to  a  spiritual 
criterion,  we  are  making  ethical  judgments  and  are  applying  the 
ethical  ideal.  We  are  dealing  with  that  aspect  of  the  self  which 
we   immediately   postulate   to  be   infinite   and   spiritual.     When, 


100  TOTAL  UTILITY  AND  THE  ECONOMIC  JUDGMENT. 

however,  we  regard  the  self,  not  in  its  eternal  or  cosmical  rela- 
tions, but  in  its  finite  and  temporal  relations,  as  being  capable  of 
complete  realisation  and  satisfaction,  given  disposition  over  an 
adequate  supply  of  economic  goods ;  and  apply  such  a  criterion 
to  the  world  of  limited  supply  in  order  to  attain  the  greatest 
possible  Total  Utility,  we  are  making  economic  judgments,  and 
dealing  with  the  economic  ideal.  This  aspect  of  the  self  we  call 
finite,  human  and  realisable.  The  canon  of  distinction  which 
may  be  used  to  differentiate  ethical  and  economic  phenomena; 
and  ethical  and  economic  fields  of  investigation  and  activity,  is 
the  determination  whether  in  a  given  judgment  the  criterion 
applied  from  an  infinite  and  spiritual,  or  a  finite  and  temporal 
concept  of  the  self.  Thus  the  ethical  ideal  may  be  applied  to 
every  aspect  of  life  provided  in  each  act  the  self  is  recognised 
as  an  infinite  factor,  spiritually  related  to  the  cosmos.  Every 
economic  judgment  may  be  an  ethical  one  if  the  choice  of  eco- 
nomic goods,  or  the  hypothetical  placing  of  goods  in  a  scale 
of  commodities  is  related  for  its  effect  on  the  "immortal  soul." 
But  the  converse  is  not  true,  that  every  ethical  judgment  may 
also  be  an  economic  one.  Economic  judgments  are  strictly  con- 
ditioned by  the  fact  of  limitation  in  the  objective  finite  world  of 
supply.  To  economise  is  to  make  the  stock  in  hand  cover  the 
greatest  extent  of  demand.  Ethical  judgments  are  often  made 
with  no  relation  to  goods  or  limited  supply,  and  have  to  do  with 
the  self  criticising  or  ordering  its  own  actions,  or  its  actions  with 
other  persons,  regarded  as  Spiritual  entities. 

Thus  the  "economic  man"  is  not  the  naturalistic  machine, 
working  automatically  by  the  motive  power  of  passion  and  greed, 
that  has  been  so  long  the  bogie  of  economists,  but  an  idealistic 
and  rational  being  whose  ethical  and  economic  conceptions  of  the 
end  of  life  are  not  "harmonious"  or  "parallel"  but  visions  of 
himself  expressed  in  infinite  and  spiritual  or  in  finite  and  temporal 
relations. 


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